Re: About to give up...

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Dan said

<<> As for the useless values, just put them into "Trash" variables. No big deal.

True but tedious...
>>


Tedious for who? the reader, or the writer. 

Remember that we don't care two hoots about the writer in the Ada design if
the writer's interest conflict with those of the reader.

(or maintainer!)

In fact the ease of accidentally ignoring returned values is one of the
great weaknesses in C. C almost invites programs to avoid taking the 
effort to deal with error indications.

If you *do* want to completely ignore returned result, I find a useful
notation to be

	Discard (func (params));

where Discard is an inlined null procedure that ignores its parameter.

But very often you will do better to do something like

        Check_Error (func (params));

where Check_Error checks that the returned result is OK, and raises an
exception if not.