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From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Pet peeve #1473
Message-ID: <6339@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 25-Aug-87 23:52:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.6339
Posted: Tue Aug 25 23:52:24 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 27-Aug-87 06:13:57 EDT
References: <9001@brl-adm.ARPA>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 28

In article <9001@brl-adm.ARPA> ultra!wayne@ames.arpa (Wayne Hathaway) writes:
>...  Sure it takes a
>miniscule amount more work to print "Unknown error 666."  But you see,
>that's *exactly* what I meant by "UNIX philosophy": it's fine as long
>as you don't ever make a mistake, but boy if you ever should, then not
>only is UNIX not going to help, it's gonna *HIDE* the one piece of
>debugging information it has!

Apparently what you mean by "UNIX philosophy" has nothing
to do with actual UNIX philosophy, since I'm one of the
more vocal proponents of the latter and I would not have
left out the error number in the message.  In fact, two
weeks ago I wrote an error-handling package quite similar
in spirit to errno and friends, and after trying the best
it can to return a meaningful error message, the last
resort of the message-finder module is to build a string
with the error number in it.

The fact that a lot of old UNIX code was implemented in
a rush, just to get some job done in a research
environment, and was never cleaned up by the commercial
vendors does NOT mean that that is recommended practice!

By the way, why not implement strerror() which will be
required in Standard C, rather than inventing bug-prone,
incompatible approaches to the same problem?  It would
make a nice addition to your C library.
	extern char *strerror( int errnum );