Stayin' alert:: moulding failure and exceptions to your needs

  • Authors:

  • Anya Helene Bagge;Valentin David;Magne Haveraaen;Karl Trygve Kalleberg

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Bergen, Norway;University of Bergen, Norway;University of Bergen, Norway;University of Bergen, Norway

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Generative programming and component engineering
  • Year:
  • 2006

  • Preparing for C++0x

    Companion to the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems languages and applications

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Abstract

Dealing with failure and exceptional situations is an important but tricky part of programming, especially when reusing existing components. Traditionally, it has been up to the designer of a library to decide whether to use a language's exception mechanism, return values, or other ways to indicate exceptional circumstances. The library user has been bound by this choice, even though it may be inconvenient for a particular use. Furthermore, normal program code is often cluttered with code dealing with exceptional circumstances.This paper introduces an alert concept which gives a uniform interface to all failure mechanisms. It separates the handling of an exceptional situation from reporting it, and allows for retro-fitting this for existing libraries. For instance, we may easily declare the error codes of the POSIX C library for file handling, and then use the library functions as if C had been extended with an exception mechanism for these functions -- a moulding of failure handling to the user's needs, independently of the library designer's choices.