friendly messages

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1369 at dsacg3.UUCP> vfm6066 at dsacg3.UUCP (John A. Ebersold) writes:
-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 agree with you in general; however, there's one common case where the
best solution seems to be to ignore the failure:  when an attempt to
output an error message (to stderr, usually) fails.  What are you going
to do, try to print yet another error message?

The "assert" macro defined by "#include <assert.h>" is very handy for
handling program logic bugs, in many cases.  Sometimes it is important
to try to recover from an error and resume normal operation, rather
than terminating the process.