On 6/29/10 4:06 AM, Jorgen Grahn wrote:
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.
I think he's talking about C functions now, not programs.
--
Robert Kern
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
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