User interaction vs. headlessness vs. exception handling

Tim Rowledge tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Mon Jul 24 16:08:57 UTC 2000



Ned Konz wrote:

> My experience with Smalltalk has been 5 years of doing machine control
> in VisualWorks. Exception handling around everything. Threads interrupting
> other threads with various notifications. And all of this working with
> their debugger (well, actually, the Crafted Smalltalk debugger by Terry
> Raymond as soon as I discovered it).
It sounds as if you are a good candidate for trying to put in some good
event handling usage in the system to provide examples for everyone
else. My point is not that EH is bad per se, but that unless it is
actually used thoroughly and the tools made to work well with it that it
is useless. 


> Aren't most Smalltalkers used to using exception handling? If not, how
> do they handle timeouts from network connections, etc.?
I doubt it. Most people are likely to be building applications using gui
builders etc. They probably ought not ever see exceptons, the framework
below them should handle everything.
 > 
> >  I can't actually agree that the exception
> > handling in Squeak is particularly fine; I get bitten too often by it
> > truncating stacks in a debugger.
> 
> Does it work worse than, say, the VW 2.5 debugger?
Can't speak to that since I haven't made any use of VW since a short
while after I left ParcPlace! I get very annoyed when I get a notifier
with its short stack listing, open a debugger and find no stack at all!


> What would you suggest?
I'm not entirely sure what the solution is. Some way to trace the
connection between the code raising exceptions and that handling them
would certainly help. It might be useful if the stack didn't disappear
until the exception is actually handled, so that it were still there if
the debugger is used?
 I

> Well, I'd like to see EH work properly.
> 
> What would you attack first?
Me too, and unfortunately I just don't have a good answer.

tim





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