The Old New Thing

More undocumented behavior and the people who rely on it: Output buffers

September 1, 2005 Sep 1, 2005 09/1/05

Raymond Chen

For functions that return data, the contents of the output buffer if the function fails are typically left unspecified. If the function fails, callers should assume nothing about the contents. But that doesn't stop them from assuming it anyway. I was reminded of this topic after reading Michael Kaplan's story of one customer who wanted ...