Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!mailrus!husc6!linus!encore!bzs From: bzs@encore.UUCP (Barry Shein) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: att & osf Message-ID: <3498@encore.UUCP> Date: 20 Aug 88 20:10:11 GMT References: <4964@killer.DALLAS.TX.US> <3395@vpk4.UUCP> <1988Aug5.211217.21037@utzoo.uucp> <2998@homxc.UUCP> <1988Aug19.204836.23395@utzoo.uucp> Organization: Encore Computer Corp, Marlboro, MA Lines: 17 In-reply-to: henry@utzoo.uucp's message of 19 Aug 88 20:48:36 GMT Henry Spencer writes... >Well, actually, it can in various ways. To take a small example, consider >the vile botch in System V interprocess communication of using -1 (rather >than 0) cast to a pointer as an error return code. That is *not* portable, >but it happens to work on certain architectures. Far be it for me to defend anyone, but this stems from a day-one bug that predates all of this (at least V6, probably earlier.) Consider that sbrk() returns -1 (specifically, (char *)-1) as an error code in all Unix's I know of (BSD, SYSV.) Real problem of conventions, should syscalls always try to return -1? Unfortunate convention! -Barry Shein, ||Encore||