On Wednesday, October 16, 2002, at 04:44 AM, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote: > People have used the terms "error" and "exception" interchangably in > this disucssion. To me, an "error" is something that stops program > execution while an "exception" may or may not stop execution depending > on what the user decides to do about exceptions.
Agreed. I've meant "exception" in my comments, in the trappable sense of the term. I don't see much need for a true untrappable error - one man's error is another man's case. > 1/0 could throw an exception, yet continue execution. Somewhere I > expect we should be able to define a policy for what to do in these > situations. > > use Policy DivideByZero => Nan; > use Policy DivideByZero => Inf; > use Policy DivideByZero => DivideByZeroException; > > I'm sure someone else can pick a better syntax than I. I don't think there are going to be many real situations when people would want Inf or Undef (99% of the rare cases where people think they might want it, they're probably wrong ;-), but NaN or Exception could indeed be common needs. -Ken