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>A program in a general purpose language cannot reliably continue after an error (without logic to handle that situation). Later steps depend on the earlier one
by rileymat2 11y ago
>A program in a general purpose language cannot reliably continue after an error (without logic to handle that situation). Later steps depend on the earlier ones having executed correctly in every detail.
I don't understand this statement. Obviously, the program cannot preform correctly, but that may not matter. For example, if a web page caches content on disk for the future, but there is an error. It may not matter that the particular disk write failed without any additional logic. The error would just cause a slightly longer load time next time.
- kazinator 11y ago> It may not matter that the particular disk write failed without any additional logic. Only if the disk write completely failed, leaving no traces of a half-broken cache entry. If you have a half-written cache entry and don't deal with that situation somehow, you end up serving the user broken content from the cache. It usually behooves us to have our code react to write errors.