Re: Language pitfalls (was Re: FORTRAN bug)

[agate!linus!linus.mitre.org!texas!jclander@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Julian C . Lander)]

In article <256@visicom.com>, rlk@VisiCom.COM (Bob Kitzberger) writes:
|> eachus@oddjob.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus) writes:
|> 
|> >    (What Robert Dewar and I objected to was that certain functions
|> >whose only intended effect is to raise an exception must still contain
|> >a return statement.  This results in junk return statements in stubbed
|> >out code, and makes a stubber much harder to write.)
|> 
|> Robert, I can't think of a reason to have a function that does nothing
|> but raise an exception... can you provide an example?  (I'm not
|> questioning the need for it -- just curious)
|> 

I didn't write this one, but it is in some code I'm using.
The situation is interface with C-language functions, which return
error codes.  The chunk of code before me (I don't know a good noun
for what it is--it builds about 3 different executables) has a function
called Raise_Appropriate_Exception, which raises the exception 
corresponding to the return code it has been passed.

Since it never gets a 0 (its caller should avoid that), it doesn't return.

I don't know that it's the best solution to the problem (I'm not wild
about it, frankly), but that's what I have.

Julian C. Lander
jclander@mitre.org