[armedbear-devel] Design issue regarding condition printing (was: Error reporting problems)

[Alessio Stalla]

On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 10:41 AM, Erik Huelsmann <ehuels at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Anyway. Some comments, without having looked at the situation in detail:
>> 1) disallowing overriding getMessage() feels wrong. The design may, and
>> likely is, incomplete, but I got a very vague feeling that the function
>> is serving a purpose. Now, I'm not entirely certain whether that purpose
>> exists on the lisp or the java side. I don't have a clear picture of that
>> yet.
>
> Right. I think I should have said "discourage overriding". However,
> the original getMessage() should be reduced to "return null" - I
> think, because it's calling writeToString() which itself is calling
> getMessage() again...

getMessage() is useful when an exception escapes to Java and you want
to understand what happened (it's part of the API of Throwable and
used to log the exception). Currently ABCL is not very helpful in that
regard: if you disable the Lisp debugger to have exceptions propagated
to Java (as it's often a case when you use ABCL as a library) you get
back anonymous exceptions with no information on what happened. That
is, I think, in important area of improvement.

Bye,
Alessio