About use of specific error

Peter Crowther Peter at ozzard.org
Fri Mar 3 20:50:21 UTC 2006


> From: stéphane ducasse
> In Java you  
> get really a lot of exceptions everywhere. The comparison is  
> interesting.

Java has had exceptions since the language was devised.  In Smalltalk, and especially in Squeak, exceptions are recent additions.  I suspect the reason that Smalltalk error handling has grown up the way it has, with variants of methods that don't throw the exception, is because error: didn't give the option of handling the problem - your code simply failed.  A Squeak exception hierarchy has not been constructed because we're still moving over from a 30-year-old legacy of throwing the user into the debugger rather than handling the exception somewhere in the call stack.

		- Peter



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