Re: Can we add an error state variable?

[Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Monday 15 October 2007 13:05, Petr Mikulik wrote:
> I don't like the name "ERRORNO" very much -- the naming is contrary to what 
> one would expect -- according to the docs it should be called 
> GPVAL_ERRORYES.

Heh.  The problems of abbreviation :-)

That was supposed to be short for "error number".
The standard name in C or Unix is "errno".  But gnuplot's variable
would not take on the same values as C's ERRNO, so I thought a
slightly different name was appropriate.

Yes, in this patch it acts like a Boolean:   zero/non-zero
But my thought was that in the future we might expand it to have
different levels of severity, or possibly user-set errors.
E.g. things like

 0 - success
-1 - internal error
-2 - eof or other read error
-3 - syntax error
>0 - set [somehow] by user-specified condition

> I would vote for just a simple name GPVAL_ERROR. 
> (Names like GPVAL_ERRORWAS don't look so nice.)

That's OK by me.


-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742