eliminates a raft of portability issues, including whether sys_nerr
exists, whether the platform has any valid negative errnos, etc.  The
downside is minimal: errno shouldn't ever contain an invalid value anyway,
and if it does, reasonably modern versions of strerror will not choke.
This rangecheck idea seemed good at the time, but it's clearly a net loss,
and I apologize to all concerned for having ever put it in.