My operating system windows keeps track of the time and date, it’s at the bottom right corner of the desktop. If I want to get the time and date, I’d expect a call (maybe a system call) that retrieves those values written at the bottom right of my screen. Instead the way people tell you to get the system time is by using functions and types such at std::chrono::clock::now and the c type time_t which are just a single (or maybe more) integer. Then there’s another step. Usually this is demonstrated with logging that type, for example: