friendly messages

[William E. Davidsen Jr]

In article <1369 at dsacg3.UUCP> vfm6066 at dsacg3.UUCP (John A. Ebersold) writes:

| On a releated topic...
| 
| How many times has anyone heard (or said) something like.  "I'm not checking
| the return value becuase I can't do anything about it anyway."
| 
| To me, this is not true.  You can always print a message that says:
| 
| Horrible error in program foo, function bar, the function bletch returned a
| -1 on about line x.
| 
| I'd rather have this than a mysterious failure.

  I've done this many times. What would you do when you get an error,
for instance, writing stderr? When I detect a serious error I attempt to
output a warning message to terminal and/or files as appropriate, then
clean up as best I can. When something is seriously wrong writing error
messages, etc, can mess up additional parts of the program.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu at ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me