That doesn't really seem better, because the fact that the unit is seconds is only obvious if you happen to be looking at the function signature in the header o

That doesn't really seem better, because the fact that the unit is seconds is only obvious if you happen to be looking at the function signature in the header or somesuch. This is because C typedefs are type aliases, not newtypes. If seconds were instead a struct with a single int field, or something like that, then that would help a little. To really solve this problem, you need information hiding, which C doesn't have except through questionable hacks.