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@iitbombay.org> wrote:

On Mar 10, 2023, at 10:03 AM, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 12:36 PM Bakul Shah <bakul@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.