Question

I’m trying to create an API that is easy to use correctly and hard to use incorrectly.

Imagine you had a function "bool MyObject_SetLocalDateTime(MyObject *pMyObject, params...)" which allows client to set date and time in YYYY MM DD HH MM SS format:

MyObject *pMyObject = MyObject_Create();
...
MyObject_SetLocalDateTime(pMyObject, params...);
...
MyObject_Destroy(&pMyObject);

What would be a good interface for the function? I’d appreciate any tips on how to make interfaces easy to use correctly and hard to use incorrectly in ANSI C (not in C++).

Answer 1

Why wouldn’t you simply use time_t and/or struct tm?

Something like the following would do just fine:

time_t my_local_time ;

MyObject_SetLocalDateTime(pMyObject, my_local_time ) ;

or

struct tm my_local_time ;

MyObject_SetLocalDateTime(pMyObject, my_local_time ) ;