This is a very poor form of checksum on copy/paste mistakes. As I describe in my top-level comment, a more complete solution to this problem is to avoid the developer ever having to copy/paste multiple lines of silly error-handling boilerplate in the first place: hell, the programmer shouldn't be feeling the need to copy/paste at all, as that's just asking for trouble :(. Instead, a #define macro can be used that would replace the "if ((error = ...) != success) goto fail;" pattern with "attempt(...);" (or, for an even more complete solution that solves other issues that are possible in this kind of code, such as resource management mistakes caused by using goto for unwind semantics or simply forgetting to check an error entirely, C++ deconstructors and exceptions can entirely remove the error handling boilerplate from this function, letting the programmer concentrate on behavior and not error conditions).