Matt pointed to an interesting article by Tom Duff on writing code. It actually clearly elucidates some of the principles that I use in writing my own code. As a caveat, I suspect that I am the original authors of at least one of the code fragments that Tom critiques. 🙂
One of those constructs is something I did for a very long time, so I’m sure I wrote some of the critiqued code. For the most part I’ve been writing in languages with exceptions for quite a while, so I’m not sure whether or not I’d do the same thing. I’ll have to write some longer C stuff just to see if I’ve changed my mind and agree with Tom, or am still of that old mindset.