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From: tswingle@oucsace.cs.ohiou.edu (Tom Swingle)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Timing in Turbo Pascal
Message-ID: <2280@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU>
Date: 27 Oct 90 17:10:35 GMT
Sender: tswingle@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU
Distribution: na
Organization: Ohio University CS Dept., Athens
Lines: 28

Does anybody know of a way to *accurately* time an event down to at least 1/100
of a second in Turbo Pascal?  I have tried using the GetTime procedure, but it
relies on DOS, which is only accurate to about 5/100 of a second. Turbo Pascal
has the Delay procedure which can accurately time to 1/1000 of a second.  Does
anybody know how they do this?

Here is what I would like to do.  I would like to create a little unit called
Timer which would have procedures for timing how long a block takes to execute
regardless of the speed of the machine it is working on.  It would work
something like this:

uses Timer;

var t:word;

begin
 MarkTime;  { Start counting now }

   . . . . . . .

 t:=TimeElapsed; { Check how much time elapsed in 1/100 seconds }
end.

This way, you could make a block take the same amount of time to execute on any
machine, regardless of that machine's speed by just looping until TimeElapsed
had reached the time you wanted it to.  But I found that it has to be accurate
to at least 1/100 of a second to be useful.  If anyone can help me it would be
greatly appreciated.  (Either E-mail or a follow-up post is fine)