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Modern C, Third Edition
book

Modern C, Third Edition

by Jens Gustedt
September 2025
Intermediate to advanced
552 pages
14h 5m
English
Manning Publications
Audiobook available
Content preview from Modern C, Third Edition

15 Program failure

This chapter covers

  • Wrongdoings leading to failure
  • Degradation of the program state
  • Unfortunate incidents
  • Anticipatory error checking
  • Cleanup

C programs can fail in very different ways—silently, sporadically, predictably, or with pomp and circumstance. Commonly, much emphasis is put on the things that may happen when a program fails, and attention is withdrawn from the questions of if a program fails and why. This is apparent with the term that is often (even falsely) applied to such situations: undefined behavior. This term even has an abbreviation in the jargon: UBC. As the term itself suggests, its focus is on the behavior of the program (or, better, the whole system) after an error occurred and not on the reasons ...

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