Bulldozer00's Blog

I’ve seen the programming advice “design interfaces to be hard to misuse” repeated many times by many different gurus over the years. Because of this personal experience, I just auto-assumed (which is not a smart thing to do!) all experienced C++ developers: knew it, took it to heart, and thought twice before violating it.

Check out the three date() function prototype declarations below. If you were responsible for designing and implementing the function for a library that would be used by your team mates, which interface would you choose to offer up to your users? Which one do you think is the “hardest to misuse“, and why?