Some Comments & Questions about ANSI C

[Peter da Silva]

In article <GEOFF.89Jun11231924 at onyx.cs.warwick.ac.uk>, geoff at cs.warwick.ac.uk (Geoff Rimmer) writes:
> 3. Am I missing something, or is "difftime" the most simple function
> around?  It seems to me that it is essentially a subtract.

time_t doesn't have to be an integer count of seconds. In fact, on MS-DOS
machines time_t looks pretty much like this:

Bits:	    15  14  13  12  11  10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1   0
Low word:  |    HOURS          |    MINUTES            |    SECONDS/2     |
High word: |      YEARS-1980       |   MONTHS          |    DAYS          |

On AmigaDOS, it's three words containing days in the epoch, minutes, and
ticks (50 ticks to a second), though most compilers turn this into a UNIX
style second count if you use a UNIX-style library call.
-- 
Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation.

Business: uunet.uu.net!ficc!peter, peter at ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180.
Personal: ...!texbell!sugar!peter, peter at sugar.hackercorp.com.