[Gretl-devel] Re: cnameset (rnameset): no error on mismatch

On Sat, 16 Jan 2021, Sven Schreiber wrote:

Actually I'm a bit uneasy about that, even though it's documented. It's common in libgretl C code, and in many library APIs, to return 0 on success or a non-zero code on failure. It's then up to the caller to check the return value and decide what to do in case of error (which might or might not be to abort execution). But it's not common in scripting languages, including hansl. Generally, one expects that if a command or function fails, execution of the script will halt, unless one takes special measures ("catch" in hansl). Different paradigms, but we're mixing them up, to a degree. So I would be in favour (not right now, just before release, of course) of revising the relatively few gretl functions that do the "return an error code" thing: let them actually fail on error, like the great majority of functions.