Ada was the language of the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Washington when I was there (late 1980's) -- because Boeing. One of the core safety me

Ada was the language of the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Washington when I was there (late 1980's) -- because Boeing. One of the core safety mechanisms was exception handling. * The biggest thing I miss is that every block was inherently a try-block. Just put your exception handlers at the bottom of the block. This provided a nice separation of "normal flow-control" and "exceptional flow-control". Why have try-catch anyway -- I never got used to that later in life. * Exceptions were not synonymous with errors. In fact the way to read a file byte by byte was just to keep reading bytes and never explicitly check for end-of-file. Let the exception handler handle this case. Logic is much cleaner. * Remember that you can't just dump core and shell out to the OS on an un-handled exception -- not if your controlling a ICBM flying of the continent. Ada really forced you to handle all errors at some level of the call-stack with an exception handler. At the outer-most level -- just call self-destruct.