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07-27-2023, 01:12 AM
A crash is not the worst thing that can happen.
I read about an old Unix file compression program (you know, like Zip) that didn't check the return value from fclose. Yes, fclose can return an error. Output to a file is normally buffered, so even if a call to fwrite or putc seems to work, and returns OK, the data may still be in a buffer, waiting to be written. When fclose is called, any unwritten data is flushed, and this may fail, since (for example) the disk may be full. And since the compression program was usually run just *because* the disk was nearly full, this happened rather often. So the program silently truncated the new, compressed file, the original uncompressed file was removed, and *the next year* or so when someone tried to uncompress the file, the end was missing!
I think this is a good example of why throwing exceptions can be good thing.
I read about an old Unix file compression program (you know, like Zip) that didn't check the return value from fclose. Yes, fclose can return an error. Output to a file is normally buffered, so even if a call to fwrite or putc seems to work, and returns OK, the data may still be in a buffer, waiting to be written. When fclose is called, any unwritten data is flushed, and this may fail, since (for example) the disk may be full. And since the compression program was usually run just *because* the disk was nearly full, this happened rather often. So the program silently truncated the new, compressed file, the original uncompressed file was removed, and *the next year* or so when someone tried to uncompress the file, the end was missing!
I think this is a good example of why throwing exceptions can be good thing.