Re:Sshole
by zbentley on Thursday November 05, 2026 @03:00PM
(#50383708)
> But all of this, and I mean all of it pales in comparison to returning '*' on error.
100% agree. This is an egregious failure. But C's error-handling story would be bad even without this, and the badness of C's error handling is what motivated the (bad) decision to return *.
It'd be great if we wrote systems software in a language that supported advanced features like...
checks notes
...returning multiple values.
Hell, even in VBA you had to at least spend the keystrokes to type "on error resume next".
Re:Sshole
by gpvos on Thursday November 05, 2026 @05:39PM
(#50385517)
It's just that every other string than "*" would have been a better choice, including even the empty string (which would have been the next terrible choice).
100% agree. This is an egregious failure. But C's error-handling story would be bad even without this, and the badness of C's error handling is what motivated the (bad) decision to return *.
It'd be great if we wrote systems software in a language that supported advanced features like...
checks notes
...returning multiple values.
Hell, even in VBA you had to at least spend the keystrokes to type "on error resume next".