John Pfersich jp1660@att.net wrote:
I'd like to make a suggestion to the VM maintainers. It would be nice to get the actual error message back from the OS, but one that would be platform independent, so that a developer could, if they choose, try to recover from the error.
It's quite tricky to get both actual and platform independent - but worth trying and int the case of sockets it might be plausible since so many socket apis are based on bsd.
I think it would be nice to have a new primitive that returns a platform independent code instead of the raw error code. Then we could add a new method that gives the developer access to that value.
Nah, that's not the way to implement it. The problem with that is, as John mentioned, the time domain validity. A global error flag is a truly dumb idea.
I have code that allows a prim to return an error code as a virtual method temp. That allows you to check quite precisely what the actual error was _from that prim_. Using the new stuff well requires quite a lot of work to make prims actually return a meaningful value so don't expect it soon. It also requires a recompile of every method calling a prim and quite possibly some work on the external prim calling stuff.
tim -- Tim Rowledge, tim@sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim "Bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet pressed <START> on the Microwave...