Re: On the case for exception-based error handling.

[Peter Scott]

At 05:20 PM 8/23/00 -0700, Glenn Linderman wrote:
I'd appreciate your description of what you meant by orthogonal, it certainly
>doesn't fit my definition, or that of my dictionaries, as far as I understand
>mathematics.  This dissertation on the meaning of the word orthogonal is, of
>course, somewhat off-topic, except to the extent that it impacts our
>communications.

I'm sorry I drove you to your dictionaries; I was probably a bit orthogonal 
myself when I wrote that :-)  It's not worth trying to recover what I 
thought I meant when you understood it anyway.

>On the other hand, you've made it very clear that you prefer to see fatal 
>error
>trapping and non-fatal error handling done with the same mechanism, 
>whether the
>word orthogonal has anything to do with it or not.
>
>We disagree.
>
>While nothing in RFC 88 precludes die and throw from sharing the same 
>underlying
>code, or similarly catch/eval, doing so isn't a good idea: it forces 
>people that
>want to use exceptions for non-fatal error handling to suddenly have to also
>handle fatal errors as well.

I think I've already stated my case as to the meanings of "fatal" and 
"non-fatal".
--
Peter Scott
Pacific Systems Design Technologies