
In response to mail from seismo!nbires!vianet!devine Sat May 9 10:19:15 1987
In my last message I proposed dividing the many date/time related functions by the rule of 'is it Unix-based or language-based?'. And I meant by a call being in Man Section 3 as roughly the same as the latter.
I don't think the division should be based on whether the function is documented in section 2 or 3 of the Unix manual, that is mostly an artifact of the Unix implementation. Instead, Something should be placed into X3J11 based on whether a standard conforming C program should be able to use the function. Something should be placed into the POSIX standard based on whether all programs running under a conforming operating system should be able to use the function. In general I think POSIX should restrict itself to low level functions (such as "time()") and should avoid specifying higher level functions (such as "ctime()"). X3J11, however, should specify both low and high level functions where that makes sense. Because of the relationship between C and Unix there will be a lot of overlap between these two and every effort should be made to keep them the same. I believe this mailing list is a reasonable place to discuss whether the various timing functions belong in X3J11, POSIX or both. It will then be up to those who are members of the standards committees to bring any results of such a discussion to the attention of the committees. I would organize "time" functions as follows: POSIX only both X3J11 only stime() time()** everything else utime()* times() time_t The reason for leaving stime() out of X3J11 is that setting a system wide time and date is not something that is done by many programs and The reason for leaving utime() out of X3J11 is that the implications of and reasons for setting file times is likely to be operating systems dependant. It is also possible to argue that if programs can read these values they should be able to set them too. * file access times (what they are and when they are set) is probably outside the purview of this mailing list. ** POSIX should probably have a "gettimeofday" call which provides better granularity than seconds. ftime() has the problem of including timezone information which I don't believe belongs in the operating system interface. -- J. J. Whelan
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