Retrying exceptions - was 'Coding with errors in mind'

[jleffler at us.ibm.com (Jonathan Leffler)]

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 
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