ANSI 'C'.

[Ray Butterworth]

>   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?