CompuServe Messages

Rick, As to why localtime() is a pointer rather than a void accepting the pointer to a tm struct as one of it's arguments—I don't know, other than that's the way it was written. I can envision a few reasons why…perhaps you want to fill out several tm structs and a single call is sufficient, perhaps you only want to grab the minutes value and don't want to carry even a local structure around (saves memory) so you just use minutes = localtime(&clock)->tm_min; and you're done with it. More than likely, it's faster that way also. I suggested the second method as it will always be correct, but in your instant case, either is correct. Again, I presume a temporary structure is set up in memory which localtime() points to…local to that particular module only. If you had pointer as a global variable and attempted to use it in another module (or perhaps even in another function) you might get wrong results. Again, this presupposes that a local structure is created a pointer to it being returned via localtime(). Now, if localtime() returns a pointer to the system structure…the one that is always there running under AmigaDOS, then the use of pointer is correct. You grab the address of the system structure once, and from there on use indirect reference to it via pointer->element. I don't know if this is a dynamic structure (that is, if the values in it change as time changes), but if that is the case, then the fact that localtime() returns a pointer to it, makes absolute sense. It would then "find" the system structure, and from there on, you'd refer to via indirection and always have the correct time and could update an on-screen clock (or whatever) based on the value changing once a minute. Don