Patch 1

[dogmatix12]

alter 'getter' functions: return uint8_t istead of int

[michaelmargolis]

The types were chosen to be consistent with other Arduino APIs at the request of the Arduino team . My initial version of this library did use eight bit types for the time properties, but this was changed to the current form when the Arduino team reviewed this library and suggested using ints. At this point I do not see much to be gained by changing the types of properties exposed by the API.

[dogmatix12]

ok, I need to save space in PROGMEM, so i made this change. (using 16-bit values does not make sense to me)

[michaelmargolis]

how many bytes do you save if this is the only change? - just curious

[dogmatix12]

• in my code, it is about 100 Bytes
• this (senseless) code is smaller by 26B:

typedef uint8_t UNIT_TYPE[3];
UNIT_TYPE t;

void loop() {
  t[0] = hour();   t[1] = minute();  t[2] = second();

  if (t[0] > 10 && t[0] < 12 && t[1] == 0) {
   delay(100);
  }
  delay(1000);
}

[PaulStoffregen]

David Mellis made those comments years ago. It's pretty clear his original intention to put this into the core library has long since been abandoned. If they ever consider merging again, I'm pretty sure this won't matter one way or the other.

However, this change will (probably) be less efficient on 32 bit chips, which are probably the future of all microcontrollers. On those platforms, using smaller than 32 bits or "int" often causes extra instructions to clear or sign extend the upper bits, since every register is always 32 bits, even if holding 8 or 16 bit data.