Path: csiph.com!news.mixmin.net!border2.nntp.ams1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!buffer2.nntp.ams1.giganews.com!nntp.brightview.co.uk!news.brightview.co.uk.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2016 00:38:49 -0500 From: Gareth Owen Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: Is there any place to talk about language features? References: <72aa4608-96be-4c09-bb2a-cf5bd0da6efa@googlegroups.com> <5def853b-2418-4f89-a7ad-3ea77b66b654@googlegroups.com> <47b562a1-78e4-4c20-86e5-e980954ab436@googlegroups.com> <6f007f5a-7bc1-48d8-aa2b-549fa09e583c@googlegroups.com> <2167a3c4-da6c-47f4-8169-5b6cc102036f@googlegroups.com> <31cf30f6-1b7a-4a27-bc79-44866f8473e5@googlegroups.com> Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2016 06:38:49 +0100 Message-ID: <87zimi595i.fsf@gmail.com> User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.5 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:/l83ZwCrX9iv+ymjzGwA28RsH48= MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Lines: 14 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-VbEMS7JqDzsuYRy41B2w3X0VCYBOGM3uXpNFkmzkwzJITT58qygFtIbMX37ZTVugUL8LkJUSaLpBF8K!pl2oewAD5sUJiRvDs3S0llp3IH46kDHY9FslU2aaVOsgw9bD1iBzR07ohjU5llmiO++f X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 2645 Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.c:94522 Ian Collins writes: >> A Malcolm-function maps a bit state on entry to a bit state on exit >> (usually we encapsulate them so that the bits we operate on are >> passed in and passed out, but that's not actually essential to a >> Malcolm-function, it can be defined to operate on global state). > > Life would be oh so much easier if most functions were "Malcolm-functions"! To be honest, I don't know why we have to limit ourselves to Malcolm-functions, that can fail through out-of-memory. I use Pangloss-functions, which simply never fail at all. That makes my reasoning about error handling even more simple than Malcolm's (and only very marginally more wrong-headed.)