Re: newbie can't get exceptions to work!

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <9atph1$n3h$1@taliesin.netcom.net.uk>, Ayende Rahien says...
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>"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
>news:KgqA6.1193$FY5.91793@www.newsranger.com...
>> little more specific. I still don't see why someone trying to track down
>> an unrelated problem in some source code always needs to know that a
>> particular value came out of an array instead of a function.
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>What about just *understanding* a code?
>For large works, you need to read a lot of code, and knowing that X is an

That's my exact point. For small works, its OK to try to take in every little
detail about how everything works in at once. If you are a reaonsably sharp
person, you ought to be able to do it. But attempting to do that in a large
program would be disasterous. If you can do that, you should be off defeating
Kasparof and Deep Blue, not toying around with programming. :-)

For a large program, you need to be able to read things in general first,
without getting bogged down in nitty implementation details. You'd like to know
generally where data comes from in the system, which you should be able to get
from the object/subprogram name. But how that data is retrieved (record, array,
complicated calculation, etc.) is only important for the particular path that
contains the bug you are looking for (or other paths that you suspect might).
There are only so many things I can keep in my head at once. If the syntax
provides detailed implementation information when I don't need it, it is
squandering some of my brain space. Perhaps some of you are just much better
endowed than I in that regard. :-)

>An array is a container for data, a function is something that return data
>based on some code that is in it.
When its just sitting in memory doing nothing, yes its just data. But if you
want to access that data by indexing into the array, that takes code to
accomplish. We are not talking about an array, we are talking about an array
*indexing operation*. This is something that returns data, using a canned
function that maps one discrete value to a (hopefully) pre-loaded object using a
simple mathamatical calculation. There is code involved, just like with any
function. In fact we could, if we wanted, write a (pragma inlined) function that
did the exact same thing and generates the exact same object code. But since
this particular function is so common and useful, it got its own type and
syntax. That doesn't make it fundametally different from a function.

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