Re: status of PL/I as a viable language

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

Vinzent Hoefler wrote:
> ACK. But even on one single system you cannot say if a better approach 
> would be ignoring or eventually handling the error.

Pretty much by definition, no one expects these kinds
of errors, since they represent errors in the logic of
the code; you would just fix the logic, not add error
handlers.

So the only thing you might have is some outer catch-all
handler which when invoked knows only that a disaster
has happened. So what do you do? Assume a bounded software
error and reboot, hoping the problem will go away? Assume
hardware failure, and go to your backups? Shut down?

Maybe it's just that someone miscounted the number of
letters in 'September' and has managed to overrun an
array by one character, and if you left it alone, the
program would keep going just fine.

There's no one right answer, but I'm firmly convinced
that ignoring errors is in the set of reasonable actions.