3 ms·

Strongly agree here. IMO libraries should try hard to return sensible error codes (within reason, eg null pointer access is unrecoverable imo) but application c

• throwawaymaths 2y ago
  Yes but here's the conflict. You design a typed language, you want the primary operators to be type stable so you can compose them. Then there's no room to return an error from a basic operation. So if your language also makes it a priority to NEVER CRASH, you are stuck.
  • wat10000 2y ago
    Right, for arithmetic operations, you must have one of: 1. Might crash. 2. Result may not be what you’d expect from conventional math. 3. Inputs and outputs are different types. 4. Nonlinear control flow i.e. exceptions. Division isn’t even particularly special here. If you have fixed-width integer types (as most languages seem to) then this is a problem for all the basic operators. 3 and 4 are attractive solutions but can get annoying or cause more bugs. (How many catch blocks out there have zero test coverage?) Between 1 and 2, 1 is usually much better. For cases where the programmer wants 2, you can provide alternate operators. For example, Swift crashes on overflow or with the standard operators, but has variants like &+ for modular arithmetic.