I'm reminded of Kent Pitman's essay "Condition Handling in the Lisp Language Family" (http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.html http://www

I'm reminded of Kent Pitman's essay "Condition Handling in the Lisp Language Family" (http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.html http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.h...): To properly understand condition handling, it is critical to understand that it is primarily about protocol, rather than mere computational ability. The establishment of protocols is a sort of before-the-fact hedge against the "prisoner's dilemma"; that is, it creates an obvious way for two people who are not directly communicating to structure independently developed code so that it works in a manner that remains coherent when such code is later combined.