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From: scs@adam.pika.mit.edu (Steve Summit)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: What is the domain of strerror()?
Message-ID: <10446@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 9 Apr 89 03:16:06 GMT
References: <1249@microsoft.UUCP> <9997@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: scs@adam.pika.mit.edu (Steve Summit)
Lines: 16

In article <9997@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>That's easy; anything the standard says is an error number is allowed,
>and anything else is up to the implementation.  I.e. the non-zero value
>of errno, as set by some functions according to the standard, is an
>acceptable "error number" for strerror().

So if a weird number is somehow passed to strerror, the result is
undefined?  This seems like asking for trouble, particularly when
it's easy enough to use sprintf(tmpbuf, "Error %d", errno); as
many implementations do.  Having the result be implementation-
defined wouldn't be too bad if it meant that the text might be
different ("Error" vs. "error," perhaps) but I'd rather it not do
the equivalent of sys_errlist[-123] and dump core.

                                            Steve Summit
                                            scs@adam.pika.mit.edu