This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 12 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 12 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
From: Per Bothner <per@xxxxxxxxxxx> Date: 15 Oct 1999 18:52:25 -0700 I know I'm out of the official "Scheme experts" loop. Still, as the author of a frequently-praised Scheme implementation, I thought I knew something about Scheme. Thus I am rather surprised that no one else agrees with me that the whole "conditions" concept requires some justification. Exceptions and conditions have been discussed at length on the Scheme Author's mailing list. You can read all about it in the archives at: http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/projects/scheme/rrrs-archive.html The relevent messages are from 1995 and 1996 and have `exception system' in the subject. The quick answer is that exception systems are used to communicate between programs. Within a single a program you can use whatever method you want for catching exceptions and whatever values you want as conditions. If two or more programs are involved they need to agree on both the exception-raising mechanism and on the kind of values that are passed to the handler. (Note to Shriram: schemers.org's link to the archives is incorrect.) (Note to the authors of SRFI-12: Hello? Is anyone home?) -Richard Kelsey