The exceptions raised by `match` are indeed not transparent. But I
don't understand why they need to be in order for the handin server to
handle them properly.

Sam

On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 5:58 PM, 'John Clements' via Racket Users
<racket-users@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>> On Apr 22, 2016, at 1:47 PM, 'John Clements' via Racket Users 
>> <racket-users@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>
>> Currently, the handin-server runs student expressions in an ‘eval’ which 
>> intercepts errors and re-raises them with a message that includes the 
>> failing expression. All good.
>>
>> However, it doesn’t catch all of them. Specifically, if the exception 
>> contains any values that are opaque to struct->vector, it gives up and 
>> re-raises the exception as-is.
>>
>> This turns out to cause a problem with “match” failures, which include such 
>> values. This causes a problem for my students, because they’re unable to see 
>> the text of the test cases that they failed.
>>
>> It’s easy enough to hack around this in my code by re-wording ‘match’ 
>> failures in the same way that wrap-evaluator does. In general, though, it 
>> seems like there’s no good reason that ‘match’ failures shouldn’t go into 
>> the same bin as division by zero, applying a non-function, and all of the 
>> other things that can go wrong during evaluation.
>>
>> In order to fix this, then, I’m trying to determine why this check exists: 
>> what exceptions do you *not* want to re-word here?
>
> Okay, answering my own question and asking another:
>
> The fundamental reason for the existence of this logic is that the 
> handin-engine is trying to be careful, and modify exceptions that can safely 
> be reconstructed. If the “skipped” value is #t, or if one or more of the 
> values in the structure are opaque, this is impossible. At this point, the 
> handin engine just throws up its hands and decides to follow the hippocratic 
> oath, “first do no harm,” and let the exception continue as is.
>
> So, this leads to a different question: *why* is the match exception 
> different from all the other exceptions? Based on my reading of the 
> struct-info documentation, it appears that the ‘match’ form constructs 
> exceptions whose inspector is not the current one, or perhaps that it fails 
> to declare itself as transparent.
>
> My guess is that this is just an oversight, and that a ‘match’ exception 
> should be just as transparent as, say, a division by zero exception. Here’s 
> code that illustrates the difference:
>
> #lang racket
>
> (with-handlers ([exn:fail?
>                  (λ (exn)
>                    (struct-info exn))])
>   (/ 1 0))
>
> (with-handlers ([exn:fail?
>                  (λ (exn)
>                    (struct-info exn))])
>   (match 13
>     ['a 4]))
>
> So, here’s my question:
>
> Is there a good reason for the difference between the `match` exception 
> (skipped is #t) and the division-by-zero exception (skipped is #f) ?
>
> John
>
>
>
>
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