It's hard to appreciate the value of restarts if you haven't seen it fully integrated into the environment like on an old lisp machine. Given any exceptional co

It's hard to appreciate the value of restarts if you haven't seen it fully integrated into the environment like on an old lisp machine. Given any exceptional condition deep down in a program, assuming appropriate restarts are bound, it can pop the debugger and let you choose how to proceed, but handlers can also be bound to handle conditions / invoke restarts programmatically. Restarts may be bound at different layers of granularity so if you had a command operating on a set of files, one one of them fails to open, the avaiable restarts might be "Retry command", "Skip this file", "Retry open", "Provide alternate filename", etc. It's sort of a missing link between interactive and batch/scriptable environments that current operating systems are missing. (My Common Lisp is getting rusty, sorry if I've slightly jubmled the condition/handler/restart lingo)