A better way to handle instrument error checking

The LabWindows/CVItrade "C" language compiler has no built in method of handling errors that occur in functions or drivers. The usual method is to use an "if" statement for every function call made, but this is very tedious and generates a lot of code. Often programs simply ignore errors and keep on going and depend on an eventual test failure to prevent acceptance of the item being tested. This leads to the wrong conclusion about what really went wrong. Other languages such as C++ have "try", "catch" and "throw" for exception handling. This paper explores several methods of handling the problem with much less code