Question

I’ve been browsing a lot of perl C library extensions and have noticed, especially in Date::Calc, that Z_int and Z_long and the like are the standard (vs ‘int’ and ‘long’).

I’m assuming this is some POSIX standard but Google has failed me for a while now trying to find a definition or source for this syntax. Do you know where this comes from, or have a good reference for this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

It’s not a standard thing; I think it’s just Steffen Beyer‘s personal notation that he uses in a number of his modules (including Date::Calc). The Z here is the math sense of Z to denote the set of integers; Z_int is signed int, whereas N_int (from N, the set of natural numbers) is unsigned int. All these typedefs are defined in the header file Toolbox.h in the modules that use them.