The Right Approach to Exceptions

[Alex Rønne Petersen]

On 19-02-2012 15:46, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 2/19/12 8:44 AM, Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
>> On 19-02-2012 15:41, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> That helps. This quite nicely illustrates that types don't necessarily
>>> need to proliferate. Something not much more constraining can be done
>>> today:
>>>
>>> try {
>>> ...
>>> } catch(IOException e)
>>> {
>>> if (e.errno !in subsetYouWantToHandle) throw e;
>>> ...
>>> }
>>>
>>>
>>> Andrei
>>
>> As I pointed out on the pull request, this is *evil*. It resets the
>> stack trace.
>
> I understand, that's a good point. Could the matter be considered an
> implementation issue?
>
> Andrei

Unfortunately, I don't think so. As far as I am aware, there is no good 
way to solve the problem; you can't know whether the user intended to 
rethrow (and thus continue the stack trace) as opposed to doing a clean 
throw.

You could say that if the throw statement is "throw new T();", then a 
new stack trace is created, and in all other cases, the stack trace is 
continued, however, this doesn't work universally (think: creating and 
returning an exception object in a function and then throwing it).

-- 
- Alex