Am I confused, or is every version of Common Lisp that predates
the 1988 X3J13 vote to add the Common Lisp Condition System
completely useless? What did people do before then?
-Calvin
In article <··········@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU>, ·······@MIT.EDU (Calvin Clark) writes:
|> Am I confused, or is every version of Common Lisp that predates
|> the 1988 X3J13 vote to add the Common Lisp Condition System
|> completely useless? What did people do before then?
I think the situation has changed less dramatically than you suggest.
Many Lisps used to have some kind of condition system, it just wasn't
standardized.
Today, the condition system is standardized, but what conditions the
system actually handles via the condition system is still largely up to
individual implementations. I.e., for many kinds of "errors", the
system can legally dump core instead of invoking the condition
system.
What I would have liked to see (and what I was assuming was intended)
was that all errors would be handled by the condition system unless the
programmer specifically disables certain runtime checks via
declarations for particular regions of code. Fortunately, that is
pretty much how actual implementations behave anyway.
Thomas.