Juliusz Chroboczek <ยทยทยท@dcs.ed.ac.uk> writes:
>[crossposted to comp.lang.ml: we need a good flamewar]
Actually, we don't.
>[...]
>I started to give an example about a searching function which returns
>a string on success and NIL on failure.
>
> `I'd just raise an exception on failure!' (that's ML-speak for
> throwing out of a scope)
>
>I then realised that because ML is strongly typed, ML programmers are
>likely to use techniques that we don't need in Lisp. And, sure
>enough, looking back at the code I wrote back in my ML days, it is
>full of exception catching. [...]
You could return a string option, None | Some of string.
Exceptions are not "needed" in such a situation in ML.
-- Rob.