The Errno Story

[Alastair Reid]

> John's first suggested alternative above seems very appealing to me, as it
> seems neatly to fix the fundamental design flaw in `errno`: that
> determining the success/failure of a system call is separated from the call
> itself. 

Slightly off-topic but it reminds me of one of my pet peeves with C...

I think the design flaw is in C and that is merely reflected in the C library.  
If you listen to the propaganda, C is just a portable assembly language and, 
in many ways, C is just that.  One of the big differences though is that in 
assembly language, there is no problem returning multiple values -just load 
up multiple registers or put multiple values on the stack- but in C, there is 
no good way to return multiple values.

--
Alastair Reid