Error Handling

[worldly rivet]

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[vestal lark]

One way of dealing with it in C, if you really have no other choice, is to use errno. You can think of errno as a global variable that you can get by including errno.h.

You can then specify a value that should indicate a possible error, say 0.
What this ends you up with is that you can trust any value other than 0 to be definitely legit, no errors, but if you get 0 you just need to check if errno is set, and if yes, to what value, and depending on that value you can do error handling.

what if I check before I even call that pop function
That also works.

Another alternative would be to return a struct like so:

typedef struct uint16_optional u16_opt;
struct uint16_optional {
    uint16_t value;
    bool exists;
};

u16_opt example_stack_pop_uint16() {
    if (stack_under_flow) {
        return { .value=0, .exists=false };
    }

    return { .value=pop_value, .exists=true };
}

*Manually setting errno is usually not what you want to do, but I figured I'd drop it nonetheless as it's quiet commonly used by the standard libraries' functions

[worldly rivet]

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