[prog] C programming - capturing information sent to stdout

[Sue Stones]

Thanks Mary, I did understand your point from the start, in fact you 
made it clearly enough for it to be obvious.     It was the borderline 
case that I couldn't understand.  Having said that I probably don't 
understand large projects well, so your extra comments were still useful.

Mary wrote:

>On Thu, Jul 14, 2005, Sue Stones wrote:
>  
>
> So, I guess my position is really that asserts aren't all that useful in
>
>complex programs for the case of "oh wow, something's gone wrong with
>the way I was used" because users of complex programs are likely to want
>behaviour more complex than "everything disappears with short error
>message about an assertation failing."
>
>The situation you want to use them in: to slightly simplify the code in
>a situation where you are pretty much doing "print error, die
>immediately" anyway sounds OK. But "print error, die immediately" is
>*all* that assert does.
>
>As far as I can see, situations where you want "print error, die
>immediately" are:
> - during development when you want to find the error and eliminate it
> - in simple programs like scripts that read in a file and do something
>   with it
>  
>
Print error message and die is *all * I want to do, and as far as I know 
is the standard response in this sort of situation.  This is not a user 
interface, its not a direct response to a user's actions.    I fully 
expect the user, when faced with an error message that it couldn't open 
a file, to be "What would it want to open a file for?"    But it is not 
looking for programmer error either. If assert generates a core dump (as 
Kathryn says) then that is *more* than I want to do. 

It sounds like this is not really a situation where assert is used.  It 
seems like assert is best reserved for checking for programmer errors.  
Thanks for helping me sort this out.

sue