Re: [Caml-list] assert caught by try with _

["Yaron M. Minsky" <yminsky@cs.cornell.edu>]

On Tue, 2003-07-29 at 17:01, Chris Hecker wrote:
> >But you might really want to catch assert failures!
> >For instance if you're building a debugging tool.
> 
> Okay, but it seems like a compile time switch would serve both 
> interests.  Plus, it seems like the "assert should blow up" usage would be 
> far more common, since the number of people writing non-debugging-tool code 
> is far larger than the number writing debugging tool code.
> 
> Another way of thinking about this is that almost everybody re-#defines 
> assert in production C/C++ programs to do their own assert handling during 
> development (whether it's printing out additional information, allowing you 
> to drop into the debugger, popping up a message box, sending bug email, 
> whatever).  With assert hard-coded into ocaml, you can't do this.  I could 
> use a different function than assert, but then it won't compile out, 
> etc.  I could use camlp4 to make my own assert, but then I take a 
> compilation speed hit on all my files, etc.
> 
> Anyway, it sounds like this behavior isn't surprising to anybody else, so 
> I'll add it to the list of things that only I think are broken about ocaml.  :)

Not so fast.  I have hit the same issue and entirely agree.  In general,
the issue of making sure that an exception escapes when you want it to
is a bit of a problem, and it would be nice to have some way of dealing
with this, and not just with asserts.  But certainly asserts should have
the option for the kind of always-die behavior you're talking about.

y

-- 
|--------/            Yaron M. Minsky              \--------|
|--------\ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/yminsky/ /--------|

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