Re: [Caml-list] Today's inflamatory opinion: exceptions are bad

[brogoff <brogoff@speakeasy.net>]

On Sun, 10 Dec 2006, Jon Harrop wrote:
> This has been done. There was a tool called ocamlexc that did whole-program
> analysis to find out which exceptions could propagate where. However, it
> wasn't useful enough to be kept up to date.

I think the fact is that it was never part of the main distribution, and
quickly became out of date. That it wasn't or wouldn't have been useful
is a conclusion that you've drawn which is arguable.

If ocamlexc were part of the distr I'd have it run against all the
programs I build. I'd like the extra checking, but, like Richard Jones,
I don't want to have that in the source code. In all of my Java I use
subclasses of RuntimeException to avoid having to list exceptions.

I'm not convinced by the arguments so far, or even that exceptions are
only for exceptional situations. Is End_of_file really exceptional?
What's the proposed alternative to End_of_file, wrapping results in
option?

-- Brian