A Philosophy of Software Design

[Walter Bright]

On 5/23/2026 11:49 PM, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole wrote:
> On 24/05/2026 4:10 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Invalid code nodes are replaced with "Error" nodes. This worked far better 
>> than I anticipated. No exceptions are thrown. It also behaves like NaN.
> 
> That's not actually how you handled it, although I'm sure it solved some 
> problems much more easily.
> 
> You handled it by checking the error count. In other words a global flag.

What the Error nodes did was eliminate the cascade of error messages resulting 
from the compiler trying to recover by guessing what the user intended. In other 
words, the Error nodes were for error recovery.

The global flag was not about error reporting or recovery.