SRC Research Report 40
SRC Research Report 40
Traditionally, C programmers have used specially designated return codes to indicate exception conditions arising during program execution. More modern languages offer alternative mechanisms that integrate exception handling into the control structure. This approach has several advantages over the use of return codes: it increases the likelihood that programming errors will be detected, makes it easier to structure the specification of an abstraction, and improves the readability of the implementation by providing better syntactic separation between handling of conventional and exceptional cases. This paper describes a set of language extensions to support exception handling in C, and a preprocessor-based implementation of those extensions that demonstrates both the feasibility and the portability of this approach.
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