menu-debugger.lisp

[Bill Long <wjl@MEDG.LCS.MIT.EDU>]

    Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1993 11:56 EDT
    From: Jeff Morrill <jmorrill@bbn.com>

      Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1993 17:26:55 +0100
      From: Vincent Keunen <keunen@montefiore.ulg.ac.be>
  
      The idea would be to put a "catch" (something like ignore-errors or a
      handler-case on "error" or "condition") at the highest level possible
      (around the top-level loop?).  Then run some code to produce as complete a
      report of the error as possible that would be written to a file, put up a
      dialog to the user saying something like "This action could not be
      completed for unknown circumstances.  Please contact the developer for
      fixing this problem." and then restart the toplevel loop.

    It would be great if we could always recover from an error without
    bothering the user with details.  The problem with this approach is that ...

Actually, that approach works fine for lots of applications.  I have a
system that diagnoses cases and with the ultimate "naive user" -- batch
processing.  I can set it to work overnight on my Symbolics on 100 cases
with the processing of each case protected by the function
"catch-errors".  In the morning I have a file of the errors of a few
cases that failed, usually from explicit error conditions in the code,
and the results from the rest.  I am now porting the system to Lucid and
am missing greatly the function catch-errors or some equivalent from the
Lucid implementation.