Exceptions

Exceptions are a way to commicate situations that cannot easily handled. An exception is a number. And only a number. The process to send an exception is called throw. The communication process follows the call stack upwardly. At any level it can be catched. Catching an exception means to handle it. It is possible to re-throw an unhandled exception. The standard amforth system has an outermost exception catcher. It handles all exceptions by printing their number and returning to the command prompt.

Exceptions are thread local. It is up to the user to catch all exceptions that may occure, since threads do not have an outermost exception catcher. An unhandled exception freezes the system.

The Forth standard specifies a number of exceptions already. Amforth provides a Subset

The general way to catch an exception is to call a word by it’s execution token with catch. catch is much like execute except that it is capable to handle exceptions:

: foo -2883 throw ;
: bar ....
  ['] foo catch
  ?dup if ( -- e )
    \ ... handle exception or
    throw \ re-throw it, leaving bar
  then
  \ only executed if no exception occured or one got handled
  ...
;

User supplied exception codes should be in the range -65000 .. -4096. To garantuee uniquness, an exception number generator should be used. It can be as simple as

-4096 Evalue exception
: exception ( -- n ) exception dup 1- to exception ;

Every call to exception allocates a new exception number. It can be used as

exception constant !!foo
exception constant !!bar


... if !!foo throw then ...

... if !!bar throw then ...