On Mon, 2010-06-28, John Nagle wrote: > On 6/28/2010 7:58 AM, Benjamin Kaplan wrote: >> How does a program return anything other than an exit code? > > Ah, yes, the second biggest design mistake in UNIX. > > Programs have "argv" and "argc", plus environment variables, > going in. So, going in, there are essentially subroutine parameters. > But all that comes back is an exit code. They should have had > something similar coming back, with arguments to "exit()" returning > the results. Then the "many small intercommunicating programs" > concept would have worked much better.
Like others said, you have standard output. sys.stdout for data, sys.stderr for human-readable errors and warnings, and the exit code for machine-readable errors. > C was like that once. In the 1970s, all you could return was > an "int" or a "float". But that got fixed. Huh? The C we have today cannot return a float, and not even a full int. 0 and 1 work, small integers up to 255 are likely to work, but beyond that common systems (Unix) will chop off the high bits. /Jorgen -- // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@ Oo o. . . \X/ snipabacken.se> O o . -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
