On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 10:45 AM, Robert Dodier <robert.dodier at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On 4/22/08, Andrej Vodopivec <andrej.vodopivec at gmail.com> wrote:
> Errors make it harder to write programmatic interfaces to Maxima,
> which, it turns out, is a major mode of use for Maxima at present.
>
Any reasonable programmatic interface must have a provision for errors.
Maxima provides a programmatic mechanism for catching errors -- errcatch.
Unfortunately, it does not catch any information on the error, and does not
suppress printout -- which should normally go to stderr or the equivalent.
> Also OK by me to throw something e.g. throw(undefined("Divergent sum"))
> although the throw--catch stuff is not much used within Maxima.
>
This is not a good idea in the current system since there is nothing to
catch such throws.
Until we improve generic error handling, I don't see any reasonable
alternative to error().
-s