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A comment on The beauty of finished software. Parent comment

Re:The beauty of finished software by adhesive_wombat on Tuesday October 31, 2023 @10:45AM (#38085640)
Are you sure it's finished? Did it handle the case where the output stream couldn't be written to, for example?
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Re:The beauty of finished software by alexvitkov on Tuesday October 31, 2023 @11:02AM (#38085920)
Likely no, just like any other software ever written.
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Re:The beauty of finished software by OkayPhysicist on Tuesday October 31, 2023 @02:26PM (#38089230)
That's outside of scope. Most programs should fail when faced with situations outside their purview.
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Re:The beauty of finished software by adhesive_wombat on Tuesday October 31, 2023 @02:56PM (#38089665)
Yes, but if you don't check the printf return code (in C, say) the program won't fail. It'll return 0 (i.e. report success) but it did not do what it promised to do on the tin. If you only check its non-negativity, you might only have written "Hell" and again the program merrily carries on and says "all OK: 0!"
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