At 02:06 AM 8/24/00 -0600, Tony Olekshy wrote:
>I just don't think that with with respect to the infrastructure
>mechanism per se, "fatality" should have anything to do with it.
>In the end, that's a judgement call; that's what we get paid the
>big bux for ;-)
I have reservations about the 'severity' tag for just this reason, although
lots of people seem to want it. As long as its domain values are words
like 'fatal', there will be argument about what that means. Callee: "I
threw a 'fatal' exception... you're not supposed to catch something like
that and keep going... how am I supposed to write my code to handle
that?" Caller: "If I can catch this thing you think is 'fatal' and I know
what to do in that case, it's my business whether or not I keep going; you
don't get to decide when my mission-critical program halts, thank you very
much."
And so forth. Anyone got any severity keywords that could be free of this
semantical minefield? Maybe just assign it a number on an open-ended
scale? I mean, the interpretation of a standard enumeration is going to
vary from user to user, so the caller is going to have to look up the
different exceptions that can be thrown by the callee anyway. The callee
ought to document which ones result from or result in a condition that does
not allow calling any of their interface safely again. But then, there
will be calls that mean that parts of the interface can no longer be
called, but other parts can, and they'll have to document that too...
--
Peter Scott
Pacific Systems Design Technologies
