From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v752.2) In-Reply-To: <90aa624e2771b2cc8bf9932b103d0017@coraid.com> References: <90aa624e2771b2cc8bf9932b103d0017@coraid.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed Message-Id: Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Michael Baldwin Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 22:17:02 -0500 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: [9fans] read of eof Topicbox-Message-UUID: e432332c-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Obviously, a read of end-of-file should return -42. And if the data is possessed, -666. Seriously, there were two languages that I thought integrated exceptions / failures well enough that you could actually use them all the time pleasantly: Icon and Mesa. System calls (or expressions) would "fail" instead of return in-band values, and the syntactic sugar was light enough on calories that you didn't have the sense that you were dragging out an exception handling harness with whipped cream on top all the time just for one little call. Ah well.