Re: A few random I/O proposals

[david carlton <carlton@husc.harvard.edu>]

On Wed, 27 May 92 21:23:17 -0700, Scott L. Burson <gyro@drums.reasoning.com> said:

> Since Scheme has no error/condition system yet, and since having
> OPEN return #f for failure is an imperfect solution for reasons that
> have been well covered, how about having OPEN accept a failure
> continuation argument?  I know this is not a popular sort of
> proposal, but I really don't understand why not; and given that the
> alternatives are not real appetizing either, I think it should be
> kept in mind as a candidate for, if nothing else, the least bad
> choice.

I don't like it at all - it doesn't generalize at all well to other
situtations where you may want to catch errors.  For example, if you
want to do some simple cleanup operations that don't depend on where
an error was signalled, you should only have to specify an
error-handler once.  Or if you are calling a function which can take
an arbitrary number of arguments but which could signal an error,
where are you supposed to pass the error handler?  I would much rather
wait for an error/condition system than adopt an inelegant solution
like this one.

david carlton
carlton@husc.harvard.edu

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