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From: kay@warwick.UUCP (Kay Dekker)
Newsgroups: net.bugs.4bsd
Subject: Taking things out (was: nroff && mesg)
Message-ID: <307@ubu.warwick.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 18-Jul-86 12:08:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: ubu.307
Posted: Fri Jul 18 12:08:32 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 12-Aug-86 07:21:17 EDT
Reply-To: kay@warwick.UUCP (Kay Dekker)
Organization: Computer Science, Warwick University, UK
Lines: 29

People have been talking about nroff turning off terminal messages, and
whether or not this is gratuitous behaviour; my vote is with those who
support taking this out.  There's another example of (what I consider)
gratuitous and insidious nastiness in the (at least) 4.1 BSD dbm library.
My boss asked me to whip up a quick database, and I thought "Hell, the
library's already there, why reinvent the wheel?".  Writes 2 pages or so
of harnessing code to wrap the library functions in, handle arguments,
do error recovery and... print diagnostics.

O horror! the dbm library contains code like this:

	if(key.dsize+dat.dsize+2*sizeof(short) >= PBLKSIZ) {
		printf("entry too big\n");
		return (-1);
	}

<<< FLAME....
Fine, it returns an error code, but - PRINTING DIAGNOSTICS?  TO STDOUT??
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!
....EMALF >>>

Am I wrong? is it not a bad and a bogus thing for library routines to do?
Are we supposed to be incapable of doing our own error reporting?

						Fume, fume...
							Kay

PS: pause 2 weeks before flaming me; warwick will be down for the duration,
and I'd hate to miss out on the free energy...