Cracks in the Foundation (PHP Advent)

Return success or failure (or a more specific error code), and store the result in a reference parameter? That's the standard C approach. If the possibility of failure exists, you'll need to check for that first anyway before using the result. For uncommon failure modes, in languages which support it, alternate continuations (including, but not limited to, C++-style exception handling) offer a more efficient solution.

> PHP has adopted the general convention that any function that fails will return false; I think this is actually quite sensible once one knows to expect it.

That's great so long as you don't need to return false in a non-failure situation... The Common Lisp solution to this is rather elegant: return two values, the first being the result or false, and the second (which you can ignore) indicating success or failure. If you know that successful results can't be false you can use the normal return value, but the extended status is there if you need it.