[dmd-internals] Throwing Errors

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, March 15, 2012 15:25:32 Walter Bright wrote:
> I've been arguing with engineers for 25 years who insist that they should be
> able to recover from detected programming bugs. It's wrong, wrong, wrong,
> wrong.
> 
> If you want to recover, use an Exception.

In general, I agree. It's just that there are a few cases where it makes 
sense. The main one has to do with unit tests. In some cases, it makes sense 
to catch an AssertError within a unit test, because assert is what's used in 
unit tests. For instance, some programmers want to test their in contracts. 
The biggest case though is that some programmers want to build more extensive 
unit testing frameworks on top of the built-in one. And to do that, you have 
to catch AssertErrors. Personally, I see no need for such frameworks, but some 
people (e.g. Jacob Carlborg) definitely want them, and if AssertErrors skip 
scope statements, finally blocks, or destructors, that's going to cause major 
problems for their frameworks.

- Jonathan M Davis