It's your aversion to C, because the hint thing does not do what you think it does. It doesn't assign three fields of a structure, it pulls three fields out of

It's your aversion to C, because the hint thing does not do what you think it does. It doesn't assign three fields of a structure, it pulls three fields out of a structure (and in my opinion, making a function just to do that is silly---it's not an opaque object (as it's documented in man pages as to the fields it has), hides the intent and further more, clutters up the code. If you make this "accessor" function static [1], then you have to include the test code in the same C file (cluttering that file with code only used for testing [2]) or you clutter the C global function namespace with a function that's quite possibly only used on one location (and thus, can't be inlined at all due to C semantics---just some of the realities of attempting TDD in C). [1] Functions and variable marked as "static" are only visible in the file. [2] And you end up with pretty much dead code in a release version. You could exclude such code from a release build, but then you can't actually test the release build of each function.