Henning Thielemann wrote:
If your program is buggy, then it may well be that the file to unlock is already unlocked and deleted.
I think you're being a tad too simplistic here. In large software systems, you get different perspectives on the code. From your module, that division by zero error may be fatal; but from my module, which may have been developed independently and is responsible for managing a number of other third party code modules, I would like to find out that your code had an error, note it in some kind of log, and then run the next person's code. That is, from my code, your programming errors were entirely anticipated "external" things that could go wrong. This sort of thing doesn't happen in all large software systems, but it's not exactly rare. Even when it's not a requirement, it's often a good idea just in the name of robust programming. A sufficiently large system is bound to have some bugs; and it's nice to be able to isolate their effects enough to continue with the functionality that works. Depends on the situation. So, given that the distinction between "error" and "exception" is not absolutely, but often just depends on your perspective (and I do take that as a given), I'd call it very broken to have different mechanisms for each. -- Chris Smith