On Dec 25, 2014 1:13 AM, "Levi Morrison" <le...@php.net> wrote: > > On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 10:34 AM, Andrea Faulds <a...@ajf.me> wrote: > > > >> On 24 Dec 2014, at 17:22, Levi Morrison <le...@php.net> wrote: > >> > >> Hmm. This thread doesn't seem to mention it, but why must failure be > >> negative? I understand the non-zero part but not negative. Aside from > >> the fact we probably have code relying on it to be negative at this > >> point is there some other reason? > > > > Hey Levi, > > > > I believe it's a convention among C APIs: 0 for success, negative for some error > > I'm asking for specific things. The reason is that some API's do a > non-zero error code; the fact that they are negative is a detail that > we should not need to care about.
The values do not matter but a consistent usage across all internal APIs.