On Thursday, 11 April 2013 at 15:43:18 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
A couple minor comments:
1. I have two issues with Error being used. One is that we
should have a specific type that is thrown, not raw Error type.
Second is that I think in situations where the error is due to
an incorrect parameter, it should be an exception not an error
(and not a straight Exception either!).
Let's go through the places where an Error or Exception is thrown:
spawnProcess() throws RangeError when args[] is empty, but this
is just the normal behaviour of arrays, and with
-release/-noboundscheck it just segfaults. As such, there is
little point in specifying this in the documentation. I'll
remove it. (Honestly, I don't know why I put it in there in the
first place. It may have had something to do with me being
thoroughly annoyed over other the lack of exception
specifications in Phobos documentation at large. I used to like
enforce(), but now I think it has given D programmers a way too
lax attitude towards error handling.)
kill() throws Error if the code/signal is negative. I suspect
the cases where this number comes directly from user input are so
few and far between that it is reasonable to expect the
programmer to ensure that it is nonnegative. In principle, on
POSIX we don't need the check, because POSIX kill() will return
an "invalid signal" error if you try to give it a negative
number. On Windows, however, TerminateProcess() takes an
unsigned integer (which is why I added the check in the first
place), and I think we should strive to have the same behaviour
on all platforms to the extent possible. I would not be strongly
opposed to making this an Exception of some kind, though, if you
think there is a good reason to do so.
pipeProcess throws Error on an invalid combination of Redirect
flags, and ProcessPipes does the same on an attempt to access a
non-redirected stream. Are we in agreement that these two are
always programming errors?
escapeShellCommand() throws Error if the input contains \0, \r or
\n. Here, it is very likely that the arguments are user input,
but it would be very strange application code that somehow
allowed those three characters to enter the input. Even so, it
may be better to make it an Exception, just to be safe.
Lars
