Re: of possible interest

[David Emery <demery@cox.net>]

There's a lot of anecdotal and probably some documented evidence on large chunks of C code where the return value of a system call was ignored.  Those 2 ATT/Bell Labs studies on common programming errors in C on the 5ESS project documented this as a problem (if I remember correctly) and recommended some solutions (but not the right one, switching to a language with exceptions and where at least syntactically, you had to provide a container for a function return, even if you ignore the result... :-). 

A good compiler should issue a warning in the following situation:

declare
	return_value : error_status_codes;
begin
	return_value := some_function (parameters);
	do_more_computations (parameters);
end;

noting that "return_value" is never used.  That's usually a hint of a problem.

    dave