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0 pointsdotancohen4y ago0 comments

To quote one of my favorite books:

  > [Hello, world] is the big hurdle. To leap over it you have to be able to
  > create the program text somewhere, compile it successfully, load it, run
  > it, and find out where your output went.

Those are the goals of "Hello, world!". Create the program, compile it, load it, run it, and find the output. Things that are not goals of "Hello, world!" are handling user input, reusable components (functions), network access, etc etc etc, error handling.

It's fine that the error is not handles, just as it is fine that the output went to stdout. Error handling was not a goal of the program.

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tialaramex4y ago

> you have to be able to create the program text somewhere, compile it successfully, load it, run it, and find out where your output went.

Note that Rust "cheats" for you here, if you ask Cargo to make you a new Rust project then by default the project it gives you will perform Hello, World correctly when you "cargo run". It will also be version controlled (if Cargo can't figure out what type of version control you prefer, but git is installed, you get a git repo).

Rust's Hello World also of course panics if given a full output device. Because just ignoring errors by default, while very C, is not a good idea and in Rust it's much easier to respond to unexpected errors by just panicking rather than ignoring them.

hnlmorg4y ago

> Those are the goals of "Hello, world!". Create the program, compile it, load it, run it, and find the output.

(Emphasis mine)

How are you going to find the output if there is an error outputting it and you're not capturing that?

Given the requirements you've given, that would absolutely make error handling mandatory in my opinion.

dotancohenOP4y ago

Interesting perspective, with which I happen to disagree. But I appreciate considering it, thank you.

oneeyedpigeon4y ago

I guess the argument is that the non-error-checking version fails at the "find out where your output went" stage. hello.c gives the impression that your output went to the file, even when it didn't.

Without a spec, I think it would be harsh to claim hello.c is wrong. But handling the error—in this case, returning it from main to the shell via an exit code—is definitely more correct.

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