Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!steinmetz!davidsen
From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: friendly messages
Message-ID: <13316@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 6 Mar 89 19:43:49 GMT
References: <435@laic.UUCP> <955@auspex.UUCP> <9218@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <5734@bsu-cs.UUCP> <90507@sun.uucp> <259@celerity.UUCP> <4970@xenna.Encore.COM> <1069@auspex.UUCP> <2849@osiris.UUCP> <1089@auspex.UUCP> <1369@dsacg3.UUCP>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Distribution: usa
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 23

In article <1369@dsacg3.UUCP> vfm6066@dsacg3.UUCP (John A. Ebersold) writes:

| On a releated topic...
| 
| How many times has anyone heard (or said) something like.  "I'm not checking
| the return value becuase I can't do anything about it anyway."
| 
| To me, this is not true.  You can always print a message that says:
| 
| Horrible error in program foo, function bar, the function bletch returned a
| -1 on about line x.
| 
| I'd rather have this than a mysterious failure.

  I've done this many times. What would you do when you get an error,
for instance, writing stderr? When I detect a serious error I attempt to
output a warning message to terminal and/or files as appropriate, then
clean up as best I can. When something is seriously wrong writing error
messages, etc, can mess up additional parts of the program.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me