28 Jul
2008
28 Jul
'08
8:50 a.m.
Eventually the return value ends up somewhere where it actually has meaning, and if used there then that part is incorrect. Granted, it could be advisable to avoid returning a very large string or an object with side-effects at destruct or something like that. But I don't consider it any more correct to return a zero than some other value when there should be no return value at all; it's garbage no matter what it is.
(The core problem is that the calling convention is bogus at the C level. Every function ought to return an integer saying how many values it left on the stack, zero or more. That'd allow implementing multiple return values.)