Let’s take the occasion of the change back from DST here in Europe, not in the US, yet, to look how times are handled in C.
The C standard proposes a large variety of types for representing times: clock_t, time_t, struct timespec, struct tm, double and textual representations as char[]. It is a bit complicated to find out what the proper type for a particular purpose is, so let me try to explain this.
The first class of “times” can be classified as calendar times, times with a granularity and range as it would typically appear in a human calendar, as for appointments, birthdays and so on. Some of the functions that manipulate these in C99 are a bit dangerous, they operate on global state. Let us have a look how these interact:
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