<<On Thu, 7 Jun 2001 15:28:52 -0400 (EDT), Jonathan Lennox <lennox@cs.columbia.edu> said:
I'm not sure I follow you...you'd prefer the 'struct timezone' (or whatever) name, but you think it wouldn't get past a standards committee?
Precisely. The reason is that the C language has opaque (incomplete) structures, but for technical reasons it cannot have opaque typedefs, and multiple typedefs for the same name in the same scope are not permitted even if they resolve to the same type. (Unless C99 fixed that bug...?) (Thus, if I am designing a library which exports a function that references a timezone, I can't use the `timezone_t' type without pulling in large amounts of namespace pollution, but I can easily do so with either a plain string, or a `struct timezone *'. Using a `void *' would also work, at the cost of type safety.) -GAWollman