At 14:01 +0200 98/06/16, Jerzy Karczmarczuk wrote:
>There is - in my opinion - nothing "exceptional" in *standard* imperative
>control structures. OK, I admit that I am a sinner myself, and I had
>written some small event-driven programs using (ppardonnez le mot)
>"longjump" in C, but I believe strongly that the functional programming
>community with the monadic religion etc. is much more close to the Truth.
I think you are raising the issue of exceptions without handling it
properly. :-)
Of course, when leaping to the next level of abstraction, exceptions are
as exceptional as irrational numbers are irrational and the imaginary
complex unit is imaginary in the original linguistic semantic sense, that
is, not at all. And C is a language whose trademark is the absence of
logical structure described by theory, so what's done in that language is
rather misleading if one wants to produce a new generation of languages
admitting new abstractions for the convenience to people that can think in
terms of abstractions and by that do more efficient work.
In fact, the opposite seems to happen, the new concept of exceptions
seems to fit those old imperative ad hoc structures into a nice single
abstraction.
As we sit here with a language, Haskell, which normally does not admit
imperative structures, using exceptions might be a neat way to do it.
Hans Aberg
* Email: Hans Aberg <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
* Home Page: <http://www.matematik.su.se/~haberg/>
* AMS member listing: <http://www.ams.org/cml/>
