Michel Fortin wrote:
Le 2010-07-30 à 11:52, Andrei Alexandrescu a écrit :
Steve Schveighoffer wrote:
If you want to avoid printing stack traces, catch the exception
inside of main. I don't think it's too much to ask.
That argument goes both ways, i.e. I could tell you it's not much
to ask to insert a try/catch if you care about the stack trace.
Calling abort() before unwinding the stack also has the advantage
that if you have a debugger hooked it'll stop you right there and
you'll have the full state of the program available at the moment the
exception was thrown *before* unwinding the stack.
D should be script-friendly, it's a huge boon and a huge appeal,
That's true.
and stack traces don't go with script friendliness.
I disagree. Stack traces can be useful when debugging a script.
Imagine your 10-line script uses a library that has a bug in it, and
all you get is the message from an exception thrown by a function
from another library used by that first library. Without a stack
trace you're totally lost.
Look at all scripts you've ever written or read. Scripts are not
conceived to figure out a bug in a library. They are conceived to get
something done quickly. If a script fails, you change it and try it
again. Nobody writes a script expecting to debug a library with it.
Let me say that I just gave a talk at Google and presented a few short
scripts that actually did something useful. People really warmed up to
that. I think it's very important for D to stay script-friendly.
If you want to throw error messages to the user using the exception
mechanism, then there could be a special exception class for that.
But normal exceptions aren't things that should be seen by the user;
and if the user sees them he'll probably seek your help and the first
thing you'll want is to know in what context the exception was
thrown: a stack trace and if necessary a debugger stopped right where
it happened.
Scripts don't obey these needs. Is it really too much to ask that if
you're writing a serious application you want to place a guard at main()
level? I mean the marginal cost is virtually nil. Why hurt casual script
users to save a few lines of a large application?
Andrei
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