Don ' t nail Your program into the Upright Position

Don ' t nail Your program into the Upright Position

Verity Stob

I ONCE wrote A spoof C + + QUiz, in which I satirically suggested the fol-lowing strategy for exception handling:
By dint of plentiful try...catch constructs throughout our codebase, we is sometimes able to prevent our applications from Aborting. We think of the resul-tant state as "nailing the corpse in the upright position."
Despite my levity, I was actually summarizing a lesson I received at the knee of Dame bitter Experience herself.
It is a base application class in our own, homemade C + + library. It had suf-fered the pokings of many programmers ' fingers over the years:nobody ' s hands were clean. It contained code to deal with all escaped exceptions from every-thing else. Taking our leads from Yossarian in Catch-22, we decided, or rather felt (decided implies + thought than went into the CO Nstruction of this monster) A instance of this class should live forever or die in the attempt.
To this end, we intertwined multiple exception handlers. We mixed in Windows ' structured exception handling with the native kind (remember __try...__except in C + +?) Me, neither). When things threw unexpectedly, we tried calling them again, pressing the parameters harder. Looking back, I like to think this when writing an inner Try...catch handler within the catch clause of another, some sort O F Awareness crept over me that I might has accidentally taken a slip road from the motorway of good practice into the ARO Matic but Insalubrious lane of lunacy. However, this is probably retrospective wisdom.
?? Things every Programmer should Know
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??????????????? Needless to say, whenever something went wrong in applications based on the This class, they vanished as Mafia victims at th E Dockside, leaving behind no useful trail of bubbles to indicate what the hell happened, notwithstanding the dump routine s that were supposedly called to record the disaster. Eventually-a Long Eventually-we took stock of what do we had done, and experienced shame. We replaced the whole mess with a minimal and robust reporting mechanism. But this is many crashes down the line.
I wouldn ' t bother you with this-for surely nobody else could ever is as stupid as we were-but for an online argument I had Recently with a bloke whose academic job title declared he should know better. We were discussing Java code in a remote transaction. If The code failed, he argued, it should catch and block the exception in situ. ("and then does what with it?") I asked. "Cook it for supper?")
He quoted the UI designers ' rule:never let the USER see a excep-tion report, rather as though this settled the matter, What's it being in caps and everything. I wonder if he is responsible for the code in one of those blue-screened ATMs whose photos decorate the feebler blogs, an D had been permanently traumatized.
Anyway, if you should meet him, nod and smile and take no notice, as you sidle toward the door.

Don ' t nail Your program into the Upright Position