First, you have to decide if you are building a batch program, or an interactive program. Then, you make your own I/O and memory wrappers with an appropriate e

First, you have to decide if you are building a batch program, or an interactive program. Then, you make your own I/O and memory wrappers with an appropriate error handling strategy: exit(), or longjmp(), etc. In addition, for a batch process, you might have isolated blocks of logic that use setjmp/longjmp to log and skip over blocks of crappy input. The point is that, as mentioned elsewhere, C is "build your own system" level -- VERY LOW (level). The overhead of wrapping primitives with strategies for your app is minimal, once you know it's an issue.