Re: Octave's exit status

[Julien Bect]

Le 09/12/2016 à 14:33, Bernardo Sulzbach a écrit :
> On 12/09/2016 06:47 AM, Julien Bect wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I observe the following with Octave 4.2.0:
> >
> > $ octave --eval '1+?'
> > parse error:
> >
> >   syntax error
> >
> > > > > 1+?
> >       ^
> >
> > error: unhandled execution exception -- eval failed
> >
> > $ echo $?
> > 0
> >
> > Is this a feature or a bug ?
>
> I can't answer for who wrote the code, but I don't consider this a bug 
> myself. I don't think that Octave itself failed as much as the 
> evaluation failed (the reasons are clearly presented, too). This seems 
> to me a successful attempt to evaluate an expression, even though this 
> resolves into errors.
>
> I don't think it would be an issue to return a nonzero value in this 
> case, but I also don't think it would fix anything.

Yes, it would fix something (for me) : if an Octave script is called 
inside a Makefile, then make would stop after the error.

Here are similar examples using other scripting langages :

$ python -c "1+#"
  File "<string>", line 1
    1+#
      ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
$ echo $?
1

$  R -q -e "1+#"
> 1+#
+
+ Erreur : unexpected end of input
Exécution arrêtée

$ echo $?
1

$ perl -e "1+#"
syntax error at -e line 1, at EOF
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.

$ echo $?
255

@++
Julien