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From: mhill@fiveliter.EBay.Sun.COM (Maurice Hill)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Functions returning Error codes or actual info
Message-ID: <285@grapevine.EBay.Sen.COM>
Date: 11 Sep 90 20:47:48 GMT
References: <772@babcock.cerc.wvu.wvnet.edu> <1990Sep11.121531.23065@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
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flaps@dgp.toronto.edu (Alan J Rosenthal) writes:

>vrm@cathedral.cerc.wvu.wvnet.edu (Vasile R. Montan) writes:
>>   I am making a set of functions which return different types of
>>values: strings, integers, doublec, etc.  For example:
>>          char *get_string();
>>However, I would also like the function to return an error code if the
>>function fails.  I cannot just return a NULL pointer because I want
>>the function to be the same as all of the other get_xxx's.

Perhaps you could implement a different error strategy.  Instead of
returning an error code, set a global such as is done with errno.  

Errno is an index into an array of predefined error messages.  You can
access the list yourself or uce the function `error("msg") to print out
your msg plus the error message that corresponds to errno.