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From: jc@piaget.UUCP (John Cornelius)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: REXX ? As in Tyrannosuarus REXX
Message-ID: <151@piaget.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 24-Dec-86 12:27:26 EST
Article-I.D.: piaget.151
Posted: Wed Dec 24 12:27:26 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 24-Dec-86 21:07:50 EST
References: <973@cuuxb.UUCP> <44600001@hcx1>
Reply-To: jc@piaget.UUCP (John Cornelius, System Manager)
Organization: International Widget
Lines: 26

In article <44600001@hcx1> daver@hcx1.UUCP writes:
 >
 >
 >>  ...  I have never seen a standard C library routine that 
 >> did not perform as documented.
 >
 >I don't know if "putw" is considered standard, but it does not behave
 >as documented (at least on our bsd4.2-vintage C "system").  The man
 >page states that it returns the word written or EOF.  In fact, a successful
 >call returns  0  , not the word written.
 >
 >I posted this to net.lang.c a while back and was told that the problem
 >was due to putw's returning an int and not being able to distinguish an
 >EOF from a valid integer.
 >
The 3B2 (System-V) also returns 0 from putw.  Apparently whoever wrote it
felt that there was no value in returning the put-ed value since it could
not be made to return error codes that were not puttable values.  There is
is casual remark (no such thing in a Unix manual, right?) under diagnostics
that indicates that ferror should be used for error checking.  Fact of the
matter is that putw doesn't return anything so ferror is the only way to get
information about how it performed.

-- 
John Cornelius
(...!sdcsvax!piaget!jc)