getF in lauxlib.c--why call feof?

[ramsdell@... (John D. Ramsdell)]

I recently realized some C code I wrote does something very similar to
what is done by luaL_loadfile in src/lauxlib.c.  I studied the code
and found, with no surprise, some really good ideas I hadn't thought
of.  For example, my code just printed an error message and exited
when a read error occurs, but luaL_loadfile adjusts the Lua stack
so that these errors are accessed as others are.

While almost all of the code was clear to me, I am unable to explain
one line of code in getF.  Why is it necessary to call feof before the
fread?  Won't fread return 0 if feof returns true?  It seems that
fread correctly handles the case of EOF.

static const char *getF (lua_State *L, void *ud, size_t *size) {
  LoadF *lf = (LoadF *)ud;
  (void)L;
  if (lf->extraline) {
    lf->extraline = 0;
    *size = 1;
    return "\n";
  }
  if (feof(lf->f)) return NULL;      /* Why? */
  *size = fread(lf->buff, 1, sizeof(lf->buff), lf->f);
  return (*size > 0) ? lf->buff : NULL;
}

John