From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Mon Jan 13 10:37:48 2003
Subject: Re: variable(s) for signal numbers?
From: Andy Adler <adler at site dot uottawa dot ca>
To: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
cc: octave-maintainers mailing list <octave-maintainers at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 11:37:20 -0500 (EST)

On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 10-Jan-2003, Andy Adler <adler at site dot uottawa dot ca> wrote:
> | Additionally, you then would have the semantics to
> | pull some 'perl'ish tricks and define virtual signals.
> |
> | I'm refering to $SIG{__WARN__} and $SIG{__DIE__},
> | which refer to code doing the corresponding things.
>
> I'm not sure how this would work.
>
> I am also interested in being able to set up handlers for signals
> inside Octave code, so you could have your own handlers.  But this
> will require a bit more work, I think.

Yes, this would clearly require more work. I was mentioning
the the syntax could be extended in this way.

Now that I look at it, Much of the general consensus within the Perl
community seems to be "$SIG{__DIE__} considered harmful".
People are encouraged to use Perl exception handling instead.

Perl uses die both to end script execution (as in error), or
like "throw" for exceptions. I just checked Matlab's version
of try/catch, and it is very similar to Perl, in that
error is used to throw an (untyped) exception, which is then
caught with "catch".

FWIW, I'm not a big fan of this kind of semantic overloading
(of "die" or "error").

I'll now retract my suggestion, as I no longer think its a
particularly good idea.

Andy