Erlang question on Artima blog

[Ulf Wiger]

On Sun, 14 Mar 2004 13:48:33 -0500, Vance Shipley <vances@REDACTED> 
wrote:

> The real trick is to decide when to accept errors and when
> not to.  You expect file:open/2 to always work and if it
> doesn't you crash.  That one's easy.  When you are parsing
> user input, like in a shell, you probably want to handle
> unexpected data without crashing.  What about external
> data arriving in a protocol?  If it doesn't obey the
> protocol should you crash or should you treat it as the
> user input case?  What about databases; if they don't
> contain the data you expect should you crash?  Designing
> an error handling strategy can be complicated.

Agreed. That's what I meant by:

On Sun, 14 Mar 2004 09:31:16 +0100, Ulf Wiger <ulf.wiger@REDACTED> wrote:

> You need to sit down and really think about how and
> where you want to handle errors in your code.

But I've found that in most of my programs, it's sufficient to
handle errors in a few places, and let the rest of the functions
exit as soon as anything unexpected happens.

/Uffe  (:
-- 
Ulf Wiger