FUTURE PERFECT

EXAMPLE1: I will have played (At the end of my vacation I will have played enough golf to last all year.)

This is the future perfect tense. It is used when the speaker wants to talk about what will have happened by a certain time.

Further examples:

* John always leaves the house at 8 o’clock, so there’s no point calling him at 8.30. He will have left by then.
* We’re late! The meeting will have already started by the time we get there.
* By the time I leave school I will have sat through more than 300 English lessons!



EXAMPLE2: I will have been playing (By the time I’m 75 I will have been playing golf for half a century.

This tense is called the future perfect continuous. It is quite rare and complicated to explain. Its main use is when the speaker refers to a time in the future and then says how long an activity will have been going on from a time in the past up to that point.

* By the time she’s 65 my mother will have been working for more than 50 years. (She got her first job when she was 14!)
* When my grandfather turns 80 next year he will have been living in the same house for more than 70 years.