From: "Jörg W Mittag" <JoergWMittag+Usenet@...>
Date: 2009-02-26T07:19:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Common Lisp conditions

Gavin Sinclair wrote:
> So far as the search engine on this newsgroup is concerned, there's
> been no discussion about including a Common Lisp-style condition
> system in a future version of Ruby.
[...]
> For those who _do_ know about Common Lisp conditions, is there any
> appetite for them in Ruby?  I see great positives and no negatives.
> They don't seem at all un-Ruby-like; in fact the relationship between
> high- and low-level code reminds me of the elegance of blocks and
> yield.

They seem to work very well in Ola Bini's new language Ioke
(<http://Ioke.Org/>), which borrows heavily from Ruby. So, I agree:
they would fit very well. Replacing Exceptions with Conditions could
probably even be done in a (somewhat) backwards-compatible way. Maybe
they could replace throw/catch, too.

> After a small amount of thought, I haven't come up with a suitable
> syntax.  That's probably because I haven't used the things, only read
> about them.

[Supersede: my original article had an example translation of the code
example from the book Practical Common Lisp, but my translation was,
for lack of a better word, bullshit. So I deleted it.]

jwm