On 2/1/11 10:04 PM, Phil Steitz wrote:
... Agreed. This is why we had a very flat hierarchy through version 2.0 of [math]. Where we are having trouble gaining consensus is how to represent specializing context information in our exceptions and what abstractions to use to represent the shallow hierarchy that we aim to build. For example, in 2.0, we have a ConvergenceException, representing the commonly occurring scenario of type b) above where an iterative algorithm has failed to converge. This exception is often caught and wrapped or recovered from internally in [math]. It has a subclass, MaxEvaluationsExceededException to represent the common convergence failure suggested by its name. I personally think we should keep this exception in 3.0. Gilles thinks that we should replace it by more granular exceptions like "MaxCountExceeded" or "NotFiniteNumberException" (another reason that a sequence can fail to converge) that have nothing to do with convergence. We are similarly at odds regarding "FunctionEvaluationException" a top-level exception indicating that an error has occurred evaluating a function.
One pattern that can make a lot of sense is to nest exceptions. Or, as I've seen in C++, to put errors in a queue to generalize and extend the errno concept. The idea is that sometimes you want to know what an exception meant at each level of the code or at each conceptual level. So you could 'throw new FailedToConverge(new MaxCountExceeded)' and have a standard way to follow the path like: ex.why(). This should result in a lot less exceptions that provide more expressiveness, plus it takes less code to do simple handling of failures: catching a single FailedToConverge for many possible causes for instance.
The two choices for composition exceptions like this are A) nesting or B) a stack or queue. They both have good points.
... Phil
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