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points by zbentley 2 days ago | 0 comments
> But all of this, and I mean all of it pales in comparison to returning '*' on error.

100% agree. This is an egregious failure. But C's error-handling story would be bad even without this, and the badness of C's error handling is what motivated the (bad) decision to return *.

It'd be great if we wrote systems software in a language that supported advanced features like...

checks notes

...returning multiple values.

Hell, even in VBA you had to at least spend the keystrokes to type "on error resume next".

[–] gpvos 2 days ago
It's just that every other string than "*" would have been a better choice, including even the empty string (which would have been the next terrible choice).
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