Proposal: API for thread-safe time zone functions

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Sat Jun 9 00:14:49 UTC 2001


Garrett Wollman <wollman at khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> writes:

> (In the FreeBSD Project, and probably many other places, our coding
> standard is very explicit: don't use typedefs for structures.  This
> deficiency in C is precisely the reason for making that requirement.)

I'm completely with Garrett on this.  Pointers to incomplete structs make
*great* opaque datatypes in C; typedefs have considerably more problems
and are really annoying to deal with.

It's really a shame that FILE wasn't instead defined as a pointer to an
incomplete struct, since the way it works right now, lots of headers that
have no need whatsoever of all the crap in stdio.h have to include it
solely because there's one function (which many callers may not even use)
that takes a FILE * as an argument.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>



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