Re: question on exceptions

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

Bob Duff says

"Think about implementation difficulty.  One reason people advocated a
"plain old function" was to make it easy to implement.  But if that
function has special rules, then the compiler has to special-case it
anyway, so it's probably even *harder* to implement it."

Absolutely! Implementing the DEC package Current_Exception which is, on the
face of it, a collection of "plain old fujnctions", is a major pain, and
the front end of the compiler has to know all sorts of special things 
about the functions in this package.