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Consistent (and conventional) spelling of struct tm #4338

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AlisdairM opened this issue Nov 11, 2020 · 5 comments · Fixed by #4483
Closed

Consistent (and conventional) spelling of struct tm #4338

AlisdairM opened this issue Nov 11, 2020 · 5 comments · Fixed by #4483
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@jensmaurer

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@AlisdairM
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AlisdairM commented Nov 11, 2020 •
edited by jwakely

Conventionally, when C++ declares or defines a struct type, such as struct timespec;, it refers to that type by name without the struct tag when used.

However, struct tm appears to be something of a special case. As this type is supplied by the C library, and appears in mostly C specified APIs, the struct tag (required by C compilers) has been preserved in much of our wording and library synopses. However, the <locale> header is an exception, consistently referring to just tm* in the functions it declares.

We should be consistent in how we reference this type in C++ source, and make an active decision to either follow the C++ convention of not repeating the struct tag on each use, or whether we prefer to follow the C convention of requiring the struct tag in each case.
@AlisdairM
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Note that I deliberately used timespec as my counterexample, as it comes from the same header and we follow the C++ conventions in this case, although it has distinctly fewer usages to establish a pattern.

@jensmaurer
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Note that this approaches "struct stat" territory (although "stat" is POSIX, not C), and we would definitely want the "struct" in front for "stat".

@jensmaurer jensmaurer added the decision-required A decision of the editorial group (or the Project Editor) is required. label Nov 11, 2020
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Editorial meeting: Drop "struct" in front of "tm" to avoid (the impression of) accidental introduction of the name in the immediately-enclosing namespace.

@jensmaurer jensmaurer removed the decision-required A decision of the editorial group (or the Project Editor) is required. label Jan 29, 2021
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We have declarations of "struct tm" in header synopses <cwchar> and <ctime>, showing that "struct tm" is a member of namespace std. That's probably not exactly great, but also likely a LWG-level larger wording issue.

@jensmaurer jensmaurer mentioned this issue Feb 5, 2021
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@jensmaurer jensmaurer self-assigned this Feb 5, 2021
@tkoeppe
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tkoeppe commented Feb 6, 2021

I don't think we spotted this detail when we reviewed P0175. Prior to that, we didn't have the synopses at all and just refered to C, so at this point I would simply consider this something unclear that we never discussed.

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[lib] Use 'tm', not 'struct tm' jensmaurer/draft
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@AlisdairM @tkoeppe @jensmaurer