Re: workshop on Exception Handling for a 21st Century Programming Language

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

If you want people to be interested in participating in a
"workshop" like this, it is better not to give the impression
that it is being organized by people who have prejudged the
issues and have made up their mind. It sounds more like a
language lobbying effort to me than an objective workshop.

P.S. tasks going away silently on unhandled exceptions is
indeed a peculiar design decision, but its importance on
a scale of 0 .. 10 is about 0.2, why? because the fix is
completely trivial, just make sure that at the outer level
of every task type, you write:

   exception
      when others => ... do what you want here

Actually I think I should reduce the importance to 0.01, why?
because whatever the language did, you would need such a
handler anyway, since no default action is useful given that
the only way to communicate to other tasks would be by some
ayshcronous mechanism which is really out of the question here.

For my own taste, I would have said that an unhandled exception
in a task caused impl defined program termination, then those
who want the current semantics can have a handler saying

  when others => null;

but if that was done, then you would still need your own
handler for serious error handling.

This is probably the only non-controversial point you made,
but as I say, although it is probably easy to get consensus
on this point, it is of negligible importance. The other
issues which you present as having obvious conclusions do
not.

An open workshop might be useful, but please announce such
a workshop with questions, not answers!



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