About use of specific error

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Fri Mar 3 23:22:39 UTC 2006


Peter Crowther wrote:
> 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.

I'm not sure I buy that. By your claim it should be the case that 
instead of:

   map at: key ifAbsent:["something"]

one would use something like

   [map at: key] on: KeyNotFoundError do:[:ex| ex return: "something"].

Personally, I really don't want to move over to the latter style.

Cheers,
   - Andreas




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