Re: F9X twister & ADA (was: n-dim'l vectors)

["James Giles" <jamesgiles@worldnet.att.net>]

Geoff Bull wrote in message <38F3F803.A4A56259@research.canon.com.au>...
...
>Actually, in my case the point of flushing files is to *not* throw away
>the evidence of where the program was up to when it crashed.

There's a difference between flushing files (which I didn't even
mention) and closing them (which loses file position information
and, on UNIX, may actually destroy temporary files).  And,
branching to a handler probably loses all of the register contents
that were present when the error arose.  I still prefer to quit
*immediately*.

The buffers are inside the system and not part of my process
image anyway.  There should be no way to quit, suspend, or
even pause a process which doesn't flush them (the system will
need the space for other processes anyway).  Systems which
throw away I/O buffer information when a process terminates
are seriously broken.

...
>Going back to your earlier example, if you decided to raise
>an exception in Z and you really did want to handle it in A
>(because of requirement of graceful operation for naive users),
>you would have to go back and modify procedures B .. Y to
>either handle or pass on the exception.

Or, you'd have to express the desire to "gracefully" terminate
in a way that doesn't involve exceptions.  Like the possibility
of sending yourself a KILL signal.  Now, you're not pretending
to be *handling* an error (which implies the possibility of
recovery), you're just quitting.

--
J. Giles