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From: rbutterworth@watmath.UUCP (Ray Butterworth)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: ANSI 'C'.
Message-ID: <171@watmath.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 20-Nov-85 12:19:32 EST
Article-I.D.: watmath.171
Posted: Wed Nov 20 12:19:32 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 21-Nov-85 03:12:48 EST
References: <447@graffiti.UUCP> <538@brl-sem.ARPA> <170@watmath.UUCP>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 13

>   The standard has no real business specifying the environment in this
> amount of detail, or perhaps it should be worded with something like
> "If you are going to supply XXXX functionality, do it like this...".

The standard obviously didn't put much thought into anything related to
times.  They define type "time_t" as an arithmetic type that represents
the time, and then define a difftime(time_t time1,time_t time2) that
computes the difference between these two arithmetic values.  Why the
function?  Does the standard have a new arithmetic type on which the
operation of subtraction is not allowed?
And then they define a function gmtime(const time_t *timer) that takes
a pointer to the arithmetic value, which it is not going to change anyway.
Why not just take the value itself instead of the pointer?