Comment by nlitened
17 hours ago
> “Make invalid states unrepresentable”
I think this phrase sounds good but is not applicable to systems that touch messy reality.
For example, I think it’s not even possible to apply it to the `tm` structure, as leap seconds are not known in advance.
I agree that messy reality can intervene, in the medium term (for about a decade) we'll need to handle leap seconds
But we can do a lot without challenging the messy reality. 61 second minutes are (regrettably) a thing in some time systems, but negative 1 million second minutes are not a thing, there's no need for this to be a signed integer!
The struct is also used for date/time arithmetic and the standard library explicitly supports out-of-range values for this reason.
I have no doubt that C "explicitly supports" this, but it's a bad idea.
The C standard library has the excuse that most of it is very old. We should do better.
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