Re: strtonum(3) from OpenBSD?

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%rek.tjls.com@localhost>]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 05:21:49PM +0200, Marc Balmer wrote:
>
> Am 23.06.2009 um 17:15 schrieb Thor Lancelot Simon:
>
>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 05:06:29PM +0200, Marc Balmer wrote:
>>>
>>> Yes, already more than one program apparently use it.  And at least  
>>> one
>>> more once we have it ;)
>>
>> Oh, my god, three programs use this bogus interface.  That by itself
>> must be a reason to check it in!
>
> care to elaborate a bit (on a technical level, if possible) why you find
> this interface bogus?

Returning an error *string* is so profoundly bogus I have trouble
imagining that anyone with more than a few weeks' experience programming
in C doesn't see why.

1) You can't switch on an error string, so you can't really ever
   programmatically do anything smart in response to failure.

2) If the error string is made a defined part of the interface, so that
   programs can "switch" on it using strcmp (UGH!), then the function
   becomes inherently non-localizable.

3) We already have defined errno values for all the error cases this
   function can reasonably be expected to encounter if properly written.

"OpenBSD did it" is no more reason to dirty up our libc with this kind
of ill-considered interface than "SCO Xenix did it".  NetBSD libc should
not be the union of every mistake anyone ever made in libc in any version
of Unix.

-- 
Thor Lancelot Simon                                        
tls%rek.tjls.com@localhost
    "Even experienced UNIX users occasionally enter rm *.* at the UNIX
     prompt only to realize too late that they have removed the wrong
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