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| -rw-r--r-- | CONVENTIONS | 12 |
1 files changed, 12 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/CONVENTIONS b/CONVENTIONS index e3c67281..ea9fa2b5 100644 --- a/CONVENTIONS +++ b/CONVENTIONS @@ -57,6 +57,18 @@ This permits common POSIX result testing: abort("odb open failed"); ---- +Functions returning a pointer may return NULL instead of an int +if there is only one type of failure (ENOMEM). + +Functions returning a pointer may also return NULL if the common +case needed by the application is strictly success/failure and a +(possibly slower) function exists that the caller can use to get +more detailed information. Parsing common data structures from +on-disk formats is a good example of this pattern; in general a +"corrupt" entity can be treated as though it does not exist but +a more sophisticated "fsck" support function can report how the +entity is malformed. + Documentation Fomatting ----------------------- |