These notes came after we lost our connection to strauss on 
02/09/06


The 
  return 1; 

inside a program to indicate failure instead of success
can be detected at the Unix command line by typing:

echo $?

If you return 0 in your program then do echo $? immediately,
you'll see a 0.

If you return 42 in your program and then... you'll see 42, etc... 



In the context of computer programming, a "robust" program is one
that can "correct more errors", or "handle bad input better".

One that is less likely to "break".

The opposite of robust might be "fragile", or "brittle"