geller@eli.UUCP (03/25/87)
Lead in: I am working at client site with many other C programmers on Honewell
mainframes. A great deal of the routines for a particular project have all
been coded in such a way that a check is always made after the routine is
called to insure that the correct number of arguments were passed to the
function. To me this entire practice seemed absurd and would/could greatly
effect the performance of critical path routines. I wondered why they would
want to waste time calling another OS-specific function every time just to
make sure the number of arguments on the stack was correct. I thought -
that's what documentation/manual pages are for.
Question: how are issues like this handled for you? It seems simple to me
but these other "C" coders are set in this mindset. Also - should
programmers be responsible for insuring that they call other functions
properly or should each routine need worry about this.
If this discussion was (over)covered recently and you would rather just
point me in the direction of those articles that's fine. Otherwise please
drop me a note. Summary promised.
David Geller
Electric Logic, Inc.
Washington, D.C.
{seismo,rlgvax}!sundc!eli!geller