Weird Language Features

[Scottie]

The "Mesa" language (used as a system language at Xerox Parc in the
70s) allowed this same fully general exception/interrupt structure.
their experience, after a number of years, was that it did not work out
so well.  Finally, they looked at all of their code, found almost all of
the uses of "fix and continue" could be easily converted to the same
kind of mechanism that Python now uses.  Of the few (five, as I recall)
remaining instances, one had a bug.  So, the last few were rewritten
and the feature was removed from the language.

"Sean 'Shaleh' Perry" <shaleh at valinux.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.982608802.22541.python-list at python.org...
> On Sun, Feb 18, 2001 at 01:16:49PM +0000, Dave Cross wrote:
> > ...1/ The programmer calls a function that doesn't actually exist within
> > the application (or libraries). Is the a feature whereby the
> > programmer can create a "catch-all" function which is called in cases
> > like these? Can this function examine the list of existing functions
> > and call the most appropriate one? Or create a new function on the fly
> > and install it into the application?
> ...python will throw an exception, the code could then decide that the
> exception was due to a missing function and decide how to deal with it.
> I suspect this could be useful in really restricted areas, but in general
> code it strikes me as horribly confusing.

-Scott