The State of Exceptions

Ralph E. Johnson johnson at cs.uiuc.edu
Fri Oct 16 16:43:45 UTC 1998


At 9:04 PM 10/12/98, Sheldon Nicholl wrote:
>I really feel like I'm going out on a limb by saying this, but I think
>Smalltalk would be a better language if non-local returns were
>removed entirely. They cause trouble all across the board, from
>the Debugger to the VM to beginning Smalltalkers trying to learn
>the language.
>
>The clean solution is continuations. Otherwise raise an exception.

But non-local returns ARE continuations.  I don't get it.

I think that non-local returns are just fine.  VisualWorks implements
them (with exception-handling) fine, Squeak just needs to follow suit.
Sure, they are a problem with beginning Smalltalkers, but no more than
pure continuations would be.

-Ralph





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