Exception handling design issues

ABSTRACT

Exception handling design issues are reflected in discussions by Zahn [1] Parnas [2], Hill [3], Elson [4], Organick [5], and myself [6, 7]. The purpose of this paper is to summarize these issues. This summary can be used to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of proposed or existing exception handling language features and as a guide in designing new features.

REFERENCES

• 1: Charles T. Zahn, Jr., A control statement for natural top-down structured programming, Programming Symposium, Proceedings Colloque sur la Programmation, p.170-180, April 09-11, 1974
• 2: Parnas, D. L. Response to detected errors in well-structured programs. Dept. of Comp. Sci., Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa., July 1972.
• 3: Hill, I. D. Faults in functions, in ALGOL and FORTRAN. <u>The Computer Journal 14</u>, 3 (March 1972), 315--316.
• 4: Elson, M. <u>Concepts of Programming Languages</u>. Science Research Assoc., Chicago, Ill., 1973.
• 5: Elliott I. Organick, The Multics System: An Examination of Its Structure, The MIT Press, 1972
• 6: John B. Goodenough, Structured exception handling, Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.204-224, January 20-22, 1975, Palo Alto, California [doi>10.1145/512976.512997]
• 7: John B. Goodenough, Exception handling: issues and a proposed notation, Communications of the ACM, v.18 n.12, p.683-696, Dec. 1975 [doi>10.1145/361227.361230]