Why leave the error handling to the caller?

On to top of page 163 in the book "The C Programming Langauge" by K &
R, they have the following:

char *strdup(char *s)
{
char *p;
p=(char *)malloc(strlen(s)+1);
if( p != NULL)
strcpy(p,s):
return p;
}

They then go on to say

"strdup passes that value on, leaving error-handling to its caller"

Why leave the error-handling to it's caller? Couldn't a person go like

char *strdup(char *s)
{
char *p;
if (p=(char *)malloc(strlen(s)+1) == NULL)
exit(1);
else
strcpy(p,s):
return p;
}


Chad

.

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