Right, so you confirm the experience of Dale. In the case of flagging errors without classes, do you generally just use a simple symbol, or concatenate strings to convey more details? This last seems somehow a bad idea... but maybe if it's never caught it's not so relevant? cheers, Toon On 04/14/2011 02:03 PM, Hernan Wilkinson wrote:
the problem is not related to technical issues (like how much machine memory you save, etc). It is related to knowledge organization... If you have two classes that define exactly the same methods, inst var, etc, why do you have two instead of one? If you answer is "because of the name of the class", remember that names are contextualized to the place where they are used... I mean, this is easy, just take all the places where exceptions are handle in Smalltalk and look what the handlers do with the exceptions. You will see that in almost all cases the exceptions are not used at all, the information they carry with them is not use at all... so, from a theory point of view it looks nice to have a big exception hierarchy but from the practical point of view is not only useless but also more difficult to use. I build a system that had an exception class base on where they were signal and not handled, we end up with around 1100 exceptions... only 3 or 4 are handled directly