[M3devel] Style question about error messages

[Coleburn, Randy]

Hendrik:

I have run into this situation also.  If you have code that runs on multiple platforms, you have to think through the best way to handle.  For example, code might work differently say between Unix and Windows.  Indeed, if you have a Windows GUI mode program and try to write to stdout there is some magic that is used to allocate a console writer on the fly.  Also, if you know you aren't using Alerts, you might be ok using the FATAL pragma as Tony suggests, but then for Wr.Failure you may want to take a different course.  Also, depending on your program, you may want to trap both of these so you can clean up any other resource use before terminating the program.  If you want more specifics, I can dig into some of my code for examples.

Regards,
Randy

-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Hosking [mailto:hosking at cs.purdue.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2010 2:16 PM
To: hendrik at topoi.pooq.com
Cc: m3devel at elegosoft.com
Subject: Re: [M3devel] Style question about error messages

You can just record that exception as fatal in that code block with the <*FATAL Thread.Alerted*> pragma.

On 23 Feb 2010, at 13:19, hendrik at topoi.pooq.com wrote:

> Somewhere in my program after it has trued and failed to read the
> input file, I have the code
>
> Wr.PutText(Stdio.stderr, "No input file.\n");
>
> Now presumably this message could be more detailed, but that's not waht
> I'm asking.  What happens to me when I compile this code is the warning:
>
> "../src/Main.m3", line 63: warning: potentially unhandled exceptions:
> Thread.Alerted, Wr.Failure
>
> Now presumably this is an indication that I ought to wrap the whole
> thing in a TRY clause.  But what am I supposed to do if the attempt to
> produce an error message fails?  Write an error message?
>
> What have other people done in this situation?
>
> --hendrik


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