[Haskell-cafe] Exceptions during exception unwinding

[Brian Bloniarz]

Sorry for the garbled post, this should hopefully be plain text:

> On Thu, 2009-10-01 at 03:29 +0000, Brian Bloniarz wrote:
>> I.e. why does an exception raised during exception handling get
>> propagated past the exception that triggered the handler?
>
> Because it's the obvious and sensible thing to do and it what every
> other mainstream language with exceptions does. The behaviour you want,
> to automatically discard any exceptions raised in the handler and to
> always re-raise the original exception can be implemented using the
> current semantics, but the reverse is not true.

Good to know ... C++ (the mainstream language I'm most familiar
with) treats throwing from a destructor during unwinding as a fatal
error.

I was suggesting having bracket ignore exceptions from closeSomeHandle
when doAction threw, not that it'd ignore any exceptions from
closeSomeHandle.
 
It's only the case where bracket has 2 exceptions to choose from that's
ambiguous, and I'm saying that there's a fair amount of code
out there that'd prefer to see the first one. Your point about ^C gets us
into an even grayer area -- maybe code would prefer to propagate whichever
of the 2 exceptions is asynchronous, or define a criterion to choose which
exception is more serious, who knows.
 
All these behaviors are easy to implement using the building blocks that
Control.Exception exports right now, you're right. So I'm free to build
my own bracket variants with different behavior and that's what I'll do.
I was just wondering if the default behavior that bracket/onException
provide (which are themselves built from catch/block/unblock) is the one
that most people want.
 
Thanks,
-Brian

 		 	   		  
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