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From: peter@graffiti.UUCP (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: ANSI 'C'.
Message-ID: <470@graffiti.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 24-Nov-85 15:01:48 EST
Article-I.D.: graffiti.470
Posted: Sun Nov 24 15:01:48 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 28-Nov-85 04:04:10 EST
References: <447@graffiti.UUCP> <538@brl-sem.ARPA> <170@watmath.UUCP> <171@watmath.UUCP> <626@sftig.UUCP>
Organization: The Power Elite, Houston, TX
Lines: 19

> Several members of the X3J11 Committee are working on a rationale
> document that will, I hope, clarify some apparently obscure choices.
> It happens that a great deal of thought went into every aspect of
> this issue.

Yes, they took the entry for ctime from the third section of the UNIX
manual and copied it verbatim. An enourmous amount of thought must have
gone into this decision, and into the decision to pull floating point
libraries in where they're not wanted by making difftime return a float.

>> (paraphrased) why is the argument to *ctime a pointer to time_t?

The reason for the pointer is a historical dreg dating back to early Version
6 'C' compilers that couldn't pass long integers to routines.
-- 
Name: Peter da Silva
Graphic: `-_-'
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