Comment by zbentley
2 days ago
> 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".
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).