function for greatest object in list less than or equal to a value

[Bob Sneidar]

That is interesting. I was always under the impression that a tick was always 1/60 of a second. It never occurred to me that this was the standard vertical refresh of the monitors in use at the time.

So are you sating that if I had a monitor that refreshed at say 120/sec, that there would then be (roughly) 120 ticks in a second? Also, since processor load can influence real time statistics, but cannot influence the vertical refresh rate, wouldn't ticks then be the more accurate unit of measure?

Bob S


On Oct 12, 2015, at 10:41 , Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com<mailto:ambassador at fourthworld.com>> wrote:

The choice of tying the ticks to retrace was perhaps a necessity in early Mac OS systems, relying as they did on preemptive multitasking. But that reliance also made it an inexact quantity:  by default the vertical retrace would happen 60 times a second, but it was possible to have some processes run long enough to stall it a bit now and then.