Re: Catch & Throw

[Urs Hoelzle <urs@otis.stanford.edu>]

> One problem I had with SELF's exit and exitValue was that it doesn't
> seem to work when an _Eval is on the stack.

This is indeed a bug, thanks for pointing it out.  Non-local returns
do not work across _Evals in the released system (i.e. if they should
return to a frame above the Eval, they always terminate the entire
program).  I fixed that in our current system; we plan to release a
new system sometime soon (hopefully January).

> This makes it difficult to handle compile errors.  The only approach I
> can think of is to actually parse the expression! 

No; _Eval fails if there are parse errors, and you can catch the
failure with a block as with any other primitive.  For example,

    ')' _EvalIfFail: [ 'parse error' printLine]

produces the output

    error: unexpected token on line 1, character 1 of "<a string>"
    	    found a ')' token
    	    expecting a token beginning a unary expression
    parse error

(The first three lines are printed by the VM.)
BTW, the new system will have processes; this makes it much easier to
handle run-time errors in evaluators since you can fork a new process
to evaluate the expression.  If an error occurs during evaluation,
only that process dies (but not the evaluator itself).

-Urs