02 May 96 19:14, Frank Adam wrote to Andrew Clarke:

 AC>> I'm not sure I fully understand what you're getting at there Frank.
 AC>> Few (if  any?) standard C library functions return 1 for success and
 AC>> 0 for failure.  That's just the way it is.

 > That's exactly what i'm getting at, i see no reason why it had to be
 > that way, but i'd love to know any of those reasons if one exists.

To provide as much information to the programmer as possible.  Boolean
values tend to hinder verbosity somewhat.  :-)

...
 > That's the whole argument, why can it be like that in some functions,
 > and not in others, especially ones which only return two possible
 > values ?

It sounds to me like you ought to write your own wrapper functions (or
macros) if you only want to know whether a function returned success or
failure.  But I wouldn't recommend it, purely because it reduces the amount
of information your program can provide you.  I guess you could always mess
around with setting a globally-available error indicator variable in each
wrapper function, but it's all extra work, and would probably turn your
application code into jelly.

 > ..And the answer is "That's just the way it is" ;-)

See, you're getting the hang of it now.

;-)

--- Msgedsq/2 3.38