Why does time(time_t *) function both return and set the by-ref?
There's no real benefit in the way it's currently defined.
I suspect that when the time() function was first defined, it used a type that could not be returned from a function. Very early C implementations didn't have long int and were not able to return structures from functions. On a system with 16-bit ints, the only way to represent a time would be as a structure or as an array; 16 bits worth of seconds is less than a day.
UPDATE: My speculation is confirmed, see below.
So early implementations of time() might have been used something like this (speculation):
time_t now;
time(&now); /* sets now.time_high, now.time_low */
or perhaps:
int now[2];
time_t(now); /* sets now[0], now[1] */
When later C implementations added longer integers and the ability to return structures by value, the ability to return a time_t value from the time() function was added, but the old functionality was kept to avoid breaking existing code.
I think that if time() were being defined today, it would look more like this:
time_t time(void);
I haven't been able to confirm that old implementations of the time() function worked this way (try Googling "time"!), but it makes sense given the history of the language.
If you pass a null pointer to the time() function, it returns the current time without also storing it in a variable; this avoids some of the performance penalty:
time_t now = time(NULL);
UPDATE
Early UNIX sources are available in https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo
Checking out the Research-V6 git tag, the man page for the time() system call is in usr/doc/man/man2/time.2. It's written in an obsolete form of *roff, but here's my attempt at formatting it. (The implementation, written in PDP-11 assembly and callable from C, is in usr/source/s2/time.s.)
C didn't have void functions at that time. Functions without a declared return type would return int by default. It's not clear to me what the time function would return, but my guess is that it would be the high-order 16-bit word of the 32-bit value. As of the date on the man page, that would have been about 1730, in units of 216 seconds (18h12m16s). Correctly written C code would not have attempted to use the return value.
TIME 8/5/73
NAME
time - get date and time
SYNOPSIS
(time = 13.)
sys time
time(tvec)
int tvec[2]
DESCRIPTION
Time returns returns the time since 00:00:00 GMT, Jan. 1, 1970, measured in seconds. From as, the high order word is in the r0 register and the low order is in r1. From C, the user-supplied vector is filled in.
SEE ALSO
date (I), stime (II), ctime (III)
It allows you to nest a call to time() within another expression, instead of doing it in a separate statement:
time_t x = time(&now) + more_time;
When the above statement finishes, now should contain the current time, and x should contain the current time plus some value.
strcpy falls in the same case because it returns the same char * pointer that has been passed as its destination, so nesting it is possible as well:
printf("Copied string is %s", strcpy(dst, src));