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This feels like semantics. If a counter repeats a value, it's effectively gone backwards and by definition is not monatomic.

A delta between two monatomic values should always be non-negative. This is not true for Unix time.



“Monotonic” means non-decreasing (or non-increasing if you’re going the other way). Values are allowed to repeat. The term you’re looking for is “strictly increasing.”


I guess this hinges on whether you think Unix time is an integer or a float. If you think it's just an integer, then yes, you can't get a negative delta.

If, however, you think it's a float, then you can.




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