Assar Westerlund wrote:
> 
> > > And besides, I really don't think this is a grep function but actually
> > > is useful for programs that don't have any strategy for handling out
> > > of memory errors and might as well die (with a descriptive error
> > > message, of course).  Let's call it emalloc and let's put in somewhere
> > > where it can be used.
> >
> > Too simple to warrant that, and other programs will likely want to
> > handle the error differently.
> 
> I don't agree.
> 
> 1. this is a small function, but it's useful in lots of programs
> 2. that helps lazy programmers write code that actually checks for
> error returns instead of just ignoring them
> 3. it helps lots of programs that don't do anything intelligent (or
> for which there isn't much bright things to do) when allocating memory
> fails
> 4. having it in a library means it's more likely to be correct
> (i.e. sz == 0)
> 
> but then again, I don't get to decide what goes in *BSD libc/libutil.
> In my library there's already a emalloc, ecalloc, and erealloc.

OTOH, though, FreeBSD's malloc() is very unlikely to return an out
of memory error.

--
Daniel C. Sobral			(8-DCS)
dcs@newsguy.com
dcs@freebsd.org

	I'm one of those bad things that happen to good people.