Is there a name for this anti-pattern/code smell?

Question

Let me start by saying that I do not advocate this approach, but I saw it recently and I was wondering if there was a name for it I could use to point the guilty party to. So h

Answer 1

This approach is actually much better than some others that I have seen. Some functions in C, for example, when they encounter an error they return and seem to succeed. The only way to tell that they failed is to call a function that will get the latest error.

I spent hours trying to debug semaphore code on my MacBook before I finally found out that sem_init doesn't work on OSX! It compiled without error and ran without causing any errors - yet the semaphore didn't work and I couldn't figure out why. I pity the people that port an application that uses POSIX semaphores to OSX and must deal with resource contention issues that have already been debugged.