On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 12:55 AM, Henning Thielemann < lemm...@henning-thielemann.de> wrote:
> > On Sun, 6 Dec 2009, Michael Snoyman wrote: > > I think there are plenty of examples like web servers. A text editor with >> plugins? I >> don't want to lose three hours worth of work just because some plugin >> wasn't written >> correctly. For many classes of programs, the distinction between error and >> exception is >> not only blurred, it's fully irrelevant. Harping on people every time they >> use error in >> the "wrong" sense seems unhelpful. >> >> Hope my commenting on this subject doesn't become my own form of >> *pedantry*. >> > > In an earlier thread I have explained that one can consider a software > architecture as divided into levels. What is an error in one level (text > editor plugin, web server thread, operating system process) is an exception > in the next higher level (text editor, web server, shell respectively). This > doesn't reduce the importance to distinguish between errors and exceptions > within one level. All approaches so far that I have seen in Haskell just mix > exceptions and errors in an arbitrary way. > I think we can all appreciate why it would be a bad thing is we treat exceptions as errors. For example, I don't want my program to crash on a file not found. On the other hand, what's so bad about treating errors as exceptions? If instead of the program crashing on an array-out-of-bound or pattern-match it throws an exception which can be caught, so what? Michael
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