Retrying exceptions - was 'Coding with errors in mind'

[mshines at purdue.edu (Michael S Hines)]

That's a rather pragmatic view, isn't it?

Perhaps if other language constructs are not used, they should be removed?

OTOH - perhaps the fault is not the language but the coder of the language?

  - lack of knowledge
  - pressure to complete lines of code
  - lack of [management] focus on security
  - or 100s of other reasons not to do the right thing...

Sort of like life, isn't it?

Mike Hines

-----Original Message-----
From: sc-l-bounces at securecoding.org [mailto:sc-l-bounces at securecoding.org]
On Behalf Of Jonathan Leffler
Sent: Friday, September 01, 2006 3:44 PM
To: sc-l at securecoding.org
Subject: [SC-L] Retrying exceptions - was 'Coding with errors in mind'

Pascal Meunier <pmeunier at cerias.net> wrote:
> Tim Hollebeek <tholleb at teknowledge.com> wrote:
> > (2) in many languages, you can't retry or resume the faulting code.
> >     Exceptions are really far less useful in this case.
>
> See above.  (Yes, Ruby supports retrying).

Bjorn Stroustrup discusses retrying exceptions in "Design and Evolution of
C++" (http://www.research.att.com/~bs/dne.html).  In particular, he
described one system where the language supported exceptions, and after some
number of years, a code review found that there was only one retryable
exception left - and IIRC the code review decided they were better off
without it.  How much are retryable exceptions really used, in Ruby or
anywhere else that supports them?

--
Jonathan Leffler (jleffler at us.ibm.com)
STSM, Informix Database Engineering, IBM Information Management Division
4100 Bohannon Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025-1013
Tel: +1 650-926-6921     Tie-Line: 630-6921
          "I don't suffer from insanity; I enjoy every minute of it!"



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