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A comment on How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006). Parent comment

Re:How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006) by AnimalMuppet on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @03:13PM (#16587460)
> The latter [the conditions mechanism for error handling] still has no analogue in other languages.

Could you explain this for a non-Lisp person? (I have some understanding of macros already.)

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Re:How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career (2006) by vzcx on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @06:42PM (#16589009)
The CL condition system separates the signaling of a condition (of which errors are a subtype), the handling of a condition, and the definition of recovery strategies (restarts).

Instead of unwinding the stack when a condition is signaled, handler code is invoked in the dynamic context of the signal and thus has much more information available to decide how to recover.

If a decision on how to recover can't be made programmatically, the system kicks out to the user where they are presented with the choices you have given them.

See: http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.h... for more.

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