still problems with ?:

[Andrew Hume]

i would second doug's comment.
a technique i have found useful (but not usable all the time) is for
routines to return a char *. on success this is 0, on error it is the actual
error message. simple to use, e.g.

	if(e = poot(args)){
		fprintf(stderr, "%s\n", e);
		exit(1);
	}