Exceptions

Introduction

Exception Handling is the process of handling an exception. With that clear, perhaps you'd like to know what it really is all about. Exceptions are errors (or exceptional events like crashing hard disks). The exceptions can either crash the program, bring up a debugger, or do something a little less disastrous like correcting the problem. Exception handlers are usually blocks of code that are registered early in the program, or right before executing another block. These exception handler blocks are executed whenever something goes wrong in a method.

In this chapter, you will discover exceptions, signals, and exception handlers. Topics include:

An comparative example of exception handling versus other approaches
Examples of common exceptions
A detailed look at how each of the Smalltalks handles a divide by zero error
Some notes on how to do your own exception handling
References to the classes and methods for exception handling in four commercial Smalltalks.

more to follow...