Mailing list for all users of the OCaml language and system.
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Jean-Christophe Filliatre <filliatr@lri.fr>
To: "Andreas Rossberg" <AndreasRossberg@web.de>
Cc: "caml-list" <caml-list@inria.fr>
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Today's inflamatory opinion: exceptions are bad
Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2006 14:27:06 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <17788.2858.414320.138285@serveur9-10.lri.fr> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <004501c71c40$b52e8d00$15b2a8c0@wiko>


Andreas Rossberg writes:
 > 
 > I guess Joe Armstrong (of Erlang fame) would have to say a lot about how to 
 > deal with failure properly. According to him, and the seemingly successful 
 > Erlang philosophy (which is, "let it crash"), attempts to locally handle 
 > errors are exactly the wrong approach. See his very insightful thesis.

This is close to one of the rules related to errors in 
Kernighan & Pike's excellent book "The practice of programming"
(http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/tpop/), which is

  # Detect errors at a low level, handle them at a high level.

I always try to follow this rule and it appears to be a very good one.
And regarding exceptions specifically, another of their rules is
this one:

  # Use exceptions only for exceptional situations. 

-- 
Jean-Christophe


  parent reply	other threads:[~2006-12-10 13:27 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 25+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2006-12-10  1:42 Brian Hurt
2006-12-10  2:40 ` [Caml-list] " skaller
2006-12-10  2:51 ` Martin Jambon
2006-12-10  3:35 ` Chris King
2006-12-10  6:32   ` Jon Harrop
2006-12-10 19:07     ` brogoff
2006-12-10 18:04   ` Richard Jones
2006-12-10 23:27     ` Chris King
2006-12-11 15:55       ` Richard Jones
2006-12-15 11:13         ` Frédéric Gava
2006-12-11 17:28     ` Mike Lin
2006-12-11 20:09       ` Richard Jones
2006-12-11 23:38   ` Olivier Andrieu
     [not found]   ` <C841DA73-83D4-4CDD-BF4A-EA803C6D6A08@vub.ac.be>
2006-12-23  4:23     ` Ocaml checked exceptions Chris King
2006-12-10  6:30 ` [Caml-list] Today's inflamatory opinion: exceptions are bad malc
2006-12-10  6:36   ` malc
2006-12-10  6:56 ` Jon Harrop
2006-12-10  9:51 ` Andreas Rossberg
2006-12-10 11:00   ` Tom
2006-12-10 11:25     ` Andreas Rossberg
2006-12-10 13:27   ` Jean-Christophe Filliatre [this message]
2006-12-10 19:15     ` Haoyang Wang
2006-12-10 21:43       ` Jean-Christophe Filliatre
2006-12-11 13:10       ` Diego Olivier FERNANDEZ PONS
2006-12-10 18:31   ` Serge Aleynikov

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=17788.2858.414320.138285@serveur9-10.lri.fr \
    --to=filliatr@lri.fr \
    --cc=AndreasRossberg@web.de \
    --cc=caml-list@inria.fr \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body. 
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox