Question

I come from a C# background, but I’m learning C at the moment. In C#, when one wants to signal that an error has occurred, you throw an exception. But what do you do in C?

Say for example you have a stack with push and pop functions. What is the best way to signal that the stack is empty during a pop ? What do you return from that function?

double pop(void)
{
    if(sp > 0)
        return val[--sp];
    else {
        printf("error: stack empty\n");
        return 0.0;
    }
}

K&R‘s example from page 77 (code above) returns a 0.0. But what if the user pushed a 0.0 earlier on the stack, how do you know whether the stack is empty or whether a correct value was returned?

Answer 1

Exception-like behavior in C is accomplished via setjmp/longjmp. However, what you really want here is an error code. If all values are potentially returnable, then you may want to take in an out-parameter as a pointer, and use that to return the value, like so:

int pop(double* outval)
{
        if(outval == 0) return -1;
        if(sp > 0)
                *outval = val[--sp];
        else {
                printf("error: stack empty\n");
                return -1;
        }
        return 0;
}

Not ideal, obviously, but such are the limitations of C.

Also, if you go this road, you may want to define symbolic constants for your error codes (or use some of the standard ones), so that a user can distinguish between “stack empty” and “you gave me a null pointer, dumbass”.