Re: The Errno Story

John's first suggested alternative above seems very appealing to me, as it seems neatly to fix the fundamental design flaw in `errno`: that determining the success/failure of a system call is separated from the call itself.

Slightly off-topic but it reminds me of one of my pet peeves with C... I think the design flaw is in C and that is merely reflected in the C library. If you listen to the propaganda, C is just a portable assembly language and, in many ways, C is just that. One of the big differences though is that in assembly language, there is no problem returning multiple values -just load up multiple registers or put multiple values on the stack- but in C, there is no good way to return multiple values. -- Alastair Reid