Comparison with False - something I don't understand

[MRAB]

On 02/12/2010 18:09, Paul Rubin wrote:
> MRAB<python at mrabarnett.plus.com>  writes:
>> When writing the C code for the new regex module I thought that it
>> would've been easier if I could've used exceptions to propagate errors
>> and unwind the stack, instead of having to return an error code which
>> had to be checked by the caller, and then have the caller explicitly
>> return an error code to /its/ caller.
>
> That's called longjmp.
>
The problem with that is that the caller might have to do some tidying
up, such as deallocation.

Exceptions give the caller the chance of catching it (ideally in a
'finally' block), tidying up, and then propagating.

>> Automatic garbage collection would also have been nice.
>
> alloca might help.

I didn't know about that.

It looks like that's allocated on the stack, and the allocation I'm
talking must be on the heap, so it's not suitable anyway.