[745] in Coldmud discussion meeting

Re: idea for custom error handling (II)

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Wed May 24 17:18:28 1995 )

Date: Wed, 24 May 95 14:13:40 -0700
From: jsp@betz.biostr.washington.edu (Jeff Prothero)
To: coldstuff@MIT.EDU


Robert de Forest:

| On a separate topic, I'd like to see traceback and
| callers include arg info.  callers is already an
| encapsulation breaking function only useful for
| debugging and such and the same goes for traceback
| :). This would allow me to inspect the args going into
| a method which caused it to throw.
| 
| I might make these changes myself, or I might not. I'd
| like to know what other people think.

Note that requiring functions to preserve their
original parameters (if that is what you are implying)
involves an architectural commitment to otherwise
unneeded work (keeping separate working and pristine
copies of all input parameters).  You might wind up
regretting this should performance tuning ever become a
preoccupation...

With Muq, I've provided an abstraction layer providing
indirect access to the callframe stack -- essentially
via a pair of functions get_stackframe_count() and
get_nth_stackframe() -- including local variables by
name.  (There are some security issues there if you're
worrying about such and have anything like setuid
functionality around.  Muq tracks the effective owner
of each stackframe and returns the contents only to the
owner or superuser.)  Muq compilers which use local
variables to hold input parameters will therefor wind
up returning at least the current values of those
variables; But there's no commitment to preserve the
original value.  Muq compilers which simply keep
parameters directly on the data stack will give the
debugger a harder time, of course...)  You might want
to give that a shot as a compromise solution before
making any commitments that might be regretted later...

I did a quick one-evening debugger based on the above
that lets one roam up and down the callstack viewing
local variable values and such;  It's kinda fun.  I'm
delyaing doing anything really fancy until X support
is in place...

 Cynbe