gjc@mitech.COM (04/30/91)
It has to be totally suprising how far Unix has gotten without a scopable error handling mechanism. In fact, I can sit down today at a SUN microsystems machine which has "soft" mounted a filesystem over a slow network/gateway machine via NFS and get different results from the directory list "ls" command, depending on the network load. I guess that shows how important condition/error handling mechanisms really are. But as "Bert" Brecht used to say: "You can be a man, or you can have a career." On a more computerese note: Interruptability is an important issue when you are implementing a reusable chunk of code to be called by different programs for various purposes. -gjc p.s. At a certain point people currently program in scheme and who want to be able to continue to program in scheme and to be able to interchange code, especially in an open way that brings forward the state of the art over time, (to avoid "standing on each others feet") will have to deal with these issues.