Zeuthen: Writing a C library, part 1
Zeuthen: Writing a C library, part 1
Posted Jul 7, 2011 0:22 UTC (Thu) by cmccabe (guest, #60281)In reply to: Zeuthen: Writing a C library, part 1 by gowen
Parent article: Zeuthen: Writing a C library, part 1
> In general, you can't return both results *and* error codes. (As I said,
> for pointers you can return NULL, and for functions whose domain of valid
> results is limited in some sense [abs()], you can, but if you're returning
> anything other than a pointer, int-type or floating-point-type, you're
> basically hosed.
>
> for pointers you can return NULL, and for functions whose domain of valid
> results is limited in some sense [abs()], you can, but if you're returning
> anything other than a pointer, int-type or floating-point-type, you're
> basically hosed.
>
If we're still talking about C/C++, then you can only ever return:
* a primitive (int, float, etc.)
* a pointer
* a struct
All of those have a natural 'none of the above' value. Integer types have 0 or a negative, floats and doubles have NaN, and pointers have NULL.
If you're returning a struct by value, then you're probably using C++, since C programmers rarely return an entire structure by value. The obvious thing to do is to either return an integer error code and take a reference to the thing to be modified, or use C++ exceptions. Either way, problem solved.
Being able to return multiple values at once is nice, but it's hardly the biggest challenge when using C or C++.