Ask HN: Who Remembers “Abort. Retry. Fail?”

Re:Ask HN: Who Remembers “Abort. Retry. Fail?” by jdlyga on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @11:25AM (#33971006)

I saw this a lot as a kid. I never understood the difference between abort and fail. I'm guessing that fail also sends failure messages?

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Re:Ask HN: Who Remembers “Abort. Retry. Fail?” by twic on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @12:08PM (#33971814)

abort:

  panic!("just stop everything");

fail:

  return Err("let someone try to handle this");

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Re:Ask HN: Who Remembers “Abort. Retry. Fail?” by mistertoolbox on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @01:46PM (#33973758)

I once saw the Abort, Retry, Fail prompt on a computer at my mom's office as a kid while it was reading a floppy disk and, being ~8 years old or so, pressed F. The A: drive went missing when it dumped back to the prompt and I got blamed. Looking back after reading the article, guess I was a victim of bad timing and an already failing drive, but that moment instilled a _healthy_ fear of the Fail option for me.

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Re:Ask HN: Who Remembers “Abort. Retry. Fail?” by justsomehnguy on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @11:32AM (#33971144)

> I'm guessing that fail also sends failure messages?

Yes.

Abort just... aborts everything, potentially dropping you to the prompt.

Fail responds with an error and let the software handle what to do now.

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Re:Ask HN: Who Remembers “Abort. Retry. Fail?” by bitwize on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @01:26PM (#33973410)

Abort: stop run, return to DOS

Retry: retry the operation (great after you put a floppy in the drive)

Fail: return from system call with an error code, program keeps running

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