On Feb 3, 2011, at 10:29, Tony Thigpen wrote: > Personally, I consider a 'branch to abnormal exit' much better than > trying to unwind all the 'perform' levels, be it COBOL or Assembler. > > I have seen programs where they attempted to unwind everything during an > error and ended up processing code unintentionally. > There's a delicate decision of what to unwind. A good example: Should you flush buffers and close files when you "get out of Dodge"? It depends on how much time remains before sundown.
A HLL which fully protects its own integrity against user errors (One contributor to this list calls such "nanny languages".) has more freedom to do termination processing. And no problem state user program should cause an initiator to bypass termination cleanup. -- gil
