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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!bellcore!decvax!linus!alliant!tj
From: tj@alliant.UUCP (Tom Jaskiewicz)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: Re:  ANSI C.
Message-ID: <156@alliant.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 22-Jan-86 18:38:26 EST
Article-I.D.: alliant.156
Posted: Wed Jan 22 18:38:26 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 25-Jan-86 03:47:42 EST
References: <3502@brl-tgr.ARPA> <618@baylor.UUCP>
Reply-To: tj@alliant.UUCP (Tom Jaskiewicz)
Organization: Alliant Computer Systems, Acton, MA
Lines: 27
Summary: 

In article <618@baylor.UUCP> peter@baylor.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>> difftime() accepts time_t arguments but returns a double.
>
>What's wrong with returning a long?

1.  time_t may give millisecond resolution (or microseconds (or nanoseconds))
which you really want to have.

2.  difftime may need to return a value larger than 2**32 (not likely but
possible).

In short, you want the range that floating point provides for you.

>What's wrong with having a function:
>
>long seconds(time)
>time_t time;

Nothing really.  But I would rather use difftime *unless* I had a good
reason not to, such as running on a machine where

>doing any floating point arithmetic in a program adds
>quite a bit of overhead.
-- 
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