Typed Yields: Non fatal exceptions

Wouldn’t it be nice to have:

begin {
&nsbr;LoadTheDatabase("foo.bar");
} rescue (Exception e) {
print "Fatal exception happened: ", e
} on (Warning w) {
print "Database Warning: ", w
} on (Message m) {
print "Database Message: ", m
}

The rescue (Exception e) should be familiar with everyone — something failed, maybe the database file was corrupted very bad, and raised an exception and the rescue block will be executed.

But what if the database has a small error, or something is only a little bit out of place. You wouldn’t want to just ignore it, but warn about it. Usually one would implement a ‘Logger’ class to which a function can log certain events, but that is ugly and inconvenient.

Enter non fatal exceptions. Basically there would be two ways to raise an exception, fatal like we all know it, and non fatal. When the on block for a non fatal exception has been executed, control will be returned to the function in which the raise was called.

This is done in about the same ways as a lot of languages implement yield. But this time the handling code depends on the type of the yielded object.

As far as Kaja and I concern this will be a feature of Paradox.

Thanks go to Bram for the idea.

Introducing Paradox

Kaja Fumei and I are currently developing a light-weight rich jit-ed language called Paradox.

The main feature of Paradox will be that it will be very light weight in memory and startup time.

It will be great to use for scripting in other applications which demand high performance like for instance games. Also for normal scripting purposes or normal applications it will be way more suitable than normal interpreted languages.

Basicly it will feature a JIT Compiler, Generation GC, rich (modulair) base library and a being very extensible.

It will probably not perform as good as the .net framework but will rather come in the range of mono`s and java`s performance, which is very high compared to the performance of normal scripts.

When Kaja, who is currently working on the JITc and gGC finished the base I’ll start working on the core library and help optimizing and I will post a preview of its capabilities.

(for those wondering how long it will take:

The Unknown – 森の中に木がない。 says:
reeally long week

)

Subtext

Subtext

I like subtext, I am just wondering how it would be possible to create a big practical project in it:

  • How would it do async operations? GUI’s; networking… If there is no difference between runtime and execution time this could be very hard to visualize
  • How would this ever perform properly? Compiling would just do but when debugging a big application it would get rather slow. When it would get dynamic, meaning that the code can drag-n-drop itself, it would be virtually impossible to get a compiled version running quick.
  • What about internal arguments? Lets make a static field in a function, and if the language wisely doesn’t support it this behaviour could also be replicated by having a file in which a number is incremented. So now we got a field in that function which number gets incremented on every call, an internal argument not known by the engine. Every function generates the same results with the same arguments but now it doesn’t and for there is no difference between runtime and developtime it would behave unpredictable.

Subtext is rather a way to create a function which is ‘instant’, it is a defenition rather than an operation. Computers can’t just do stuff instantly like read a whole file or execute operations.

I like the idea, but I just see no real practical use.