Eh, zero on failure, I suppose. The real write(2) syscall returns -1 on failure, and a non-negative value is the number of bytes actually written. But the general point still stands.
When I wrote my hypothetical example, I was imagining the return type to be a bool. My apologies for overloading "write", a more representative example function name would have been something like "FooWrite". I appreciate your follow-up!
I totally agree with you that folk writing code need to understand the semantics of what they're building on top of. Humans and now AI models have a great capacity for generating tons source code without understanding the semantics, though.
