Ancient Sibyls, such as the famous Pythia, frequently responded to
supplicants' questions in a dark and mysterious way. (Croesus, for instance,
was told that attacking the Persians would "destroy a great empire"; that
this could also mean his own did not occur to him.)
I was reminded of this by looking at the Javadoc for the
org.drools.time.SessionClock method getCurrentTime, which is documented to
return a long value, albeit explicitly stating that the semantics of this
value is not defined and that an implementation of this interface may do as
it pleases.
All that's needed to clear this oracular obfuscation is another method,
giving the number of nanoseconds per unit of the getCurrentTime return
value. Why ever has this not been added?
-W