Re: question on exceptions

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Bob Duff says

"By the way, during the design of Ada 9X, it was suggested that we have
functions for querying things like the Current_Exception_Name and
Current_Exception_String.  However, the design team rejected this idea
for the reasons explained above -- presumably the semantics of calling
these at the wrong time would be "erroneous", which is bad.  My main
complaint about the Ada 95 design for this stuff is that the information
associated with an exception *must* be of type String.  I suppose you
can encode whatever information you want in a string, but not with type
safety."

I see no reason why these could not be functoins which can only be called
within a handler, checked statically by the compiler. This is how GNAT
implements the DEC Current_Exception package (which has these semantics).