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From: Kilgallen@SpamCop.net (Larry Kilgallen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: I/O - exception handling
Date: 26 May 2003 21:20:39 -0500
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In article <D7zAa.12988$xV3.9550@nwrdny03.gnilink.net>, Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> writes:
> Sergey Koshcheyev wrote:
>> Now of course, the fact that Close raises exceptions seems sort of useless,
>> even unhelpful. What am I supposed to do with a file, if I can't close it?
> 
> We encounter this in C++ as well. The only thing you can do when close
> fails is to notify the user. C++ fstream objects have a close method
> which returns an error code if the underlying close fails, and their
> destructors just do a close without checking for errors, so you can
> have it whichever way you want.

I saw a case where a major defect in some software (not Ada or C*)
that would have been detected in a much less disruptive fashion if
only a failure on closing a file had not been ignored.  The person
who programmed it to be ignored thought "the file failing to close
will be immaterial shortly after this anyway" whereas in fact the
failure to close ended up indicating (or not, in this case) some
significant error in overall program logic.