Functions returning Error codes or actual info
Alan J Rosenthal
flaps at dgp.toronto.edu
Wed Sep 12 02:15:31 AEST 1990
vrm at cathedral.cerc.wvu.wvnet.edu (Vasile R. Montan) writes:
> I am making a set of functions which return different types of
>values: strings, integers, doubles, etc. For example:
> char *get_string();
>However, I would also like the function to return an error code if the
>function fails. I cannot just return a NULL pointer because I want
>the function to be the same as all of the other get_xxx's.
A method you didn't mention is to return a null pointer, and have a #defined
constant for this. If you return some kind of distinguished value already for
the integer functions, such as -1, you may want to have:
#define INTERROR (-1)
in your .h file. So put:
#define STRINGERROR ((char *)0)
in your .h file as well.
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