Time

The current system time is available via the system supplied Date type. This type specifies “now” as the default value to use whenever a new variable is initialized to that type. A conversion operation can be specified which provides “now” in the desired format.

This type supports a variety of conversion operations which extract the desired time components as tuples such as H, M, S, ms, HMS, MDY, DMY, etc. So you can do this kind of thing:

current time = Date.HMS()
today = Date.MDY()

It is important to avoid naming collisions with system supplied types. At the moment these are Integer, Rational, Boolean, String, Nominal, Ordinal and Date. Since most types used by the modeler will be constrained versions of the system types (Pressure, instead of Rational, Tail Number instead of String) or base types such as Boolean, this should not be much of an encumbrance.