[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie! [ really sun vs dec/apollo --> X and NeWS ]

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 10:32:20AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 10:50 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> > So in the BitKeeper source, perror is redifined to my_perror which is
> > this:
> >
> > void
> > my_perror(char *file, int line, char *msg)
> > {
> >         char    *p = 0;
> >         int     save = errno;
> >
> >         if (p = getenv("_BK_VERSION")) {
> >                 if (strneq(p, "bk-", 3)) p += 3;
> >                 fprintf(stderr, "%s:%d (%s): ", file, line, p);
> >         } else {
> >                 fprintf(stderr, "%s:%d: ", file, line);
> >         }
> >         if (p = strerror(errno)) {
> >                 fprintf(stderr, "%s: %s\n", msg, p);
> >         } else {
> >                 fprintf(stderr, "%s: errno=%d\n", msg, errno);
> >         }
> >         errno = save;
> > }
> >
> > libc should do that.
> 
> 
> ???+1,  indeed!??? - knowing where the the error came from (file and line) is
> huge. Yeah it means putting it in the preprocessor, which has some issues;
> but it comes back to a previous comment I have made -- I really believe a
> serious production language needs a preprocessor that is carefully used
> because there are places (like this one) that just makes the right things
> happen.

Yep.  And the _BK_VERSION stuff is obviously BK specific, but if there was
a way to generalize that so you could have _APPLICATION_VERSION or something
and that got printed with the error then you get stuff like

slib.c:1653 (bk-7.3): open failed: permission denied

which is way way way more useful than just permission denied.