cj,
well I got your point anyway.
When time calculation is needed it's easier (and a lot faster) to do it from one long integer than calculate and substract and .... from between human readable times.
even thou they might be in msecs.hmmm... when now coming to think about it, I'm not sure anymore did I understand you:
I would more like to get macros like @ydayno.
I mean some macro that returns days since 1.1.2000
and minutes since 00:00 
but since I got the change to do it with udf, I will get it faster by doing my own code.
BTW, I don't think the ticks are so usefull as macro.
couldn't it be better to have function to which you say:
$ = tick(1) ;starts
and
$ticks = tick(0) ;stops
and it returns cycles, msecs secs or whatever in the between?
