🚀 go-pugleaf

halasz@caip.rutgers.edu writes:
>What is this but to decree that 0 is success, whatevver the OS s custom is?

How soon they forget.
    "There is no such thing as a standard interface to a non-standard feature".

An operating system can use any status convention it likes.  VMS status codes
are really packed records, with "severity", "source", and other fields.  If I
recall correctly, Plan 9 uses strings.  The B6700 MCP allowed arbitrary 48-bit
patterns, some of which were integers and most of which weren't.

The thing is, if you want to access some facility which is not in the C
standard, you have to use a function that is not in the C standard to do it.

The exit() function says NOTHING about what status codes the operating system
has to use.  What the standard is saying is
 -- if you want to use the "native" status codes in some operating system,
    you will have to use a "native" function to do that, and it isn't the
    _C_ standard's business to dictate what _that_ function looks like.

 -- if you want a PORTABLE way to terminate with success/failure, use
    exit(0) or exit(EXIT_SUCCESS)/exit(EXIT_FAILURE)

 -- if exit(N) for some other value of N happens to be useful in your
    operating system, that's nice, but "You didn't read it here".

It has been a long time since I used VMS or VAX-11 C, but I thought there
was a SYS$EXIT(longword) function you could use to terminate "natively".

Zero has to mean success AS FAR AS THE exit() FUNCTION IS CONCERNED,
because exit() is governed by the C standard.
Zero does NOT have to mean success as far as any other function is concerned.

Now _my_ pet peeve is the way so much crud-for-UNIX code uses exit(-1),
when UNIX status codes are 0..255.

-- 
"conventional orthography is ... a near optimal system for the
 lexical representation of English words." Chomsky & Halle, S.P.E.
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~ok; RMIT Comp.Sci.