At 12:27 AM 2/14/99 -0500, Alan Knight wrote:

>   - More powerful exception handling also makes this kind of thing less
>necessary. e.g. In Java an exception unwinds the stack before it hits the
>handler, a "feature I could go on about at length". In Smalltalk it doesn't
>(and I assume in Squeak, though I've never checked), so you can do much
>more complex things at a higher-level handler, like reconnect to the
>database and resume from where it was thrown (or anywhere else in between).

This was also the case in Cedar, and when the ex-Xerox crowd at DEC-SRC
went to design Modula-2+ and the ex-Xerox crowd at Acorn went to design
their version of pretty much the same, so did they (they probably worked
together on it, actually) and that same crowd later at Sun came down hard
against C++ having "resumable exceptions".  I *think* it was a matter of
"this is (in our opinion) so rarely useful that it does not justify the
implementation hair that it provokes".

I won't be able to respond at length, nor is it necessarily a good idea :-),
for about a week.

David