Which one is better is certainly subjective :)  Maybe we could get the old
TeX-y behavior via a switch or the other way around?

Alan, allow me to disagree with your assertions, though.  Here are a few
reasons:
1) You could correct a spelling mistake on the prompt (as in original TeX),
although this is rarely done these days.
2) You could use the --nonstopmode or --batchmode to not get the prompt,
and not have the lingering background process (Mac bug?).
3) You could see a collection of errors which might help you in fixing them
altogether without having to run context again and again finding one error
at a time.  (Same thing with compiling a C/C++ code, and getting a list of
many errors at once.)
4) There are many "errors" and "warnings" that context does not stop on.
You could perhaps claim moving on from those is also useless :)  Just to
give some examples: missing modules, fonts, glyphs in fonts, etc.

So let me rephrase my original question:  Is this change in behavior
intended?  If so, is it possible to get the old behavior (specially for
nonstopmode) via some switch?

Thanks a lot,
~~MHB

On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 12:28 AM Alan Braslau <braslau.list@comcast.net>
wrote:

> On Mon, 15 Apr 2019 23:11:17 -0400
> Mohammad Hossein Bateni <bateni@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > ConTeXt used to recover better from errors.  Consider the following file:
> >
> > =============
> > \xyz
> > \abc
> >
> > \starttext
> > HELLO
> > \stoptext
> > =============
> >
> > Running  ConTeXt  ver: 2019.03.21 21:39 MKIV beta  fmt: 2019.3.26  int:
> > english/english would catch both "Undefined control sequence" errors
> before
> > exiting with the message "mtx-context     | fatal error: return code:
> > 256".  (I either press enter to move to the next error, or I use the
> > --nonstopmode option.)
> >
> > Now with ConTeXt  ver: 2019.04.13 17:01 MKIV beta  fmt: 2019.4.15  int:
> > english/english, even when I do not supply the --nonstopmode option,
> > ConTeXt exits abnormally with the same error message right after
> > discovering the first undefined control sequence.  The old "?" TeX prompt
> > allowing once to fix the misspellings, etc. does not appear at all.
> >
> > Has some defaults changed?  Is it possible to get the old behavior?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > ~MHB
>
> I much prefer the new behavior, for the previous prompt was pretty useless
> and there was little point going on without correcting an earlier error.
> Furthermore, the model would often leave a furtive process running in the
> background following a keyboard interrupt (especially on Mac OSX). The new
> process does not do this.
>
> Alan
>