[COFF] [TUHS] Re: Conditions, AKA exceptions. (Was: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary)

Marshall Conover marzhall.o at gmail.com
Sat Mar 11 05:57:40 AEST 2023


While all this error and exception discussion is going down, I have to
mention this piece: http://joeduffyblog.com/2016/02/07/the-error-model/

The author worked at MS on their "midori" research OS, and discussed what
went into their decisions around using return codes, exceptions, etc. I
felt it was a nice breakdown of the pros and cons of the different
approaches, and fleshed out the concepts in my mind a bit. I thought others
might enjoy it as well.

That said, I absolutely loathe exceptions with all my heart. In my
experience, along Warner and Matt's lines, they're more prone to the sort
of abuse that wastes my time than they are productive. It's not that they
can't be used well, they just so often aren't.

Cheers,

Marshall

On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 1:57 PM Bakul Shah <bakul at iitbombay.org> wrote:

> On Mar 10, 2023, at 10:03 AM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 12:36 PM Bakul Shah <bakul at iitbombay.org> wrote:
> >> During development the runtime should simply invoke a debugger in this
> case. This should be perfectly doable but for some reason it is considered
> acceptable to crash a program! I don’t want to run a program *under a
> debugger* but want it invoked at the right time!
> >
> > Common Lisp implementations have been doing that for years! Too bad
> > using Lisp means bringing all the rest of the Lisp stuff with it,
> > including the attitude. Oh well. :-)
>
> It can even fix the problem and continue!
>
> Note that such things don't have to be *tied* to Lisp. But that
> would require a change in mindset.
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