🚀 go-pugleaf

I'd like to discuss a few things about what I am implementing at the moment,
first among them being the issue of exception handling in C.

Exception handling is always a messy business, and C doesn't cope
particularly well with it, although in fact I've yet to meet a language
which does.

For those of you who don't know what exception handling is, it's what the
language does when things go wrong.  For instance, what happens when you do
a divide by zero?  Much of the exception handling is an academic question:
with facilities built into the language, you are stuck with what you are
given.  However, in your own code, you have some say over how you want to
handle exceptional cases.

Three things I wanted to have with an exception handling facility were:

*  every module which raised an exception should include some facility for
   coping with this exception (usually by displaying an error message to
   the user).  This means that you should not get unhandled exceptions ever.
   However, there should still be some fallback facility for handling
   buggy code.

*  exceptions should be interceptable.  For instance, if I call a routine
   to open a file, and the routine raises an exception if that file doesn't
   exist, then an error message may not always be appropriate for that
   situation.  I should be able to intercept that exception, and in this
   case, decide not to raise an error.

*  exceptions should not alter the normal flow of code.  If you allow
   an exception to land you somewhere else in the program, then you end
   up with a mess that makes spaghetti look friendly.  Instead, exceptions
   should be coped with in a manner resembling interrupt handlers.

Those were my base ideas for handling exceptions.  What I came up with was
essentially each module registering a handler with an 'error' module.  The
most recent registered handler is passed the exception first.  If it doesn't
handle the exception, then the next most recent handler is called, and so on.

How do other people cope with exceptions?  Is there something I'm missing?
I've noticed that my way of doing adds the additional ability to cope well
with internationalisation, which is an added bonus.

								Ug!