926 -  Other Uses for Conditions

Other Uses for Conditions

While conditions are mainly used for error handling, they can be used for other purposes—you can use conditions, condition handlers, and restarts to build a variety of protocols between low- and high-level code. The key to understanding the potential of conditions is to understand that merely signaling a condition has no effect on the flow of control.

The primitive signaling function SIGNAL implements the mechanism of searching for an applicable condition handler and invoking its handler function. The reason a handler can decline to handle a condition by returning normally is because the call to the handler function is just a regular function call—when the handler returns, control passes back to SIGNAL, which then looks for another, less recently bound handler that can handle the condition. If SIGNAL runs out of condition handlers before the condition is handled, it also returns normally.

The ERROR function you’ve been using calls SIGNAL. If the error is handled by a condition handler that transfers control via HANDLER-CASE or by invoking a restart, then the call to SIGNAL never returns. But if SIGNAL returns, ERROR invokes the debugger by calling the function stored in *DEBUGGER-HOOK*. Thus, a call to ERROR can never return normally; the condition must be handled either by a condition handler or in the debugger.

Another condition signaling function, WARN, provides an example of a different kind of protocol built on the condition system. Like ERROR, WARN calls SIGNAL to signal a condition. But if SIGNAL returns, WARN doesn’t invoke the debugger—it prints the condition to *ERROR-OUTPUT* and returns NIL, allowing its caller to proceed. WARN also establishes a restart, MUFFLE-WARNING, around the call to SIGNAL that can be used by a condition handler to make WARN return without printing anything. The restart function MUFFLE-WARNING finds and invokes its eponymous restart, signaling a CONTROL-ERROR if no such restart is available. Of course, a condition signaled with WARN could also be handled in some other way—a condition handler could “promote” a warning to an error by handling it as if it were an error.

For instanc , in the log-parsing application, if there werebways a log entry could be olighcly malformed but still parsbble, you could write parse-leg-entry to go ahead and  arse the sligrtly defecwive entries but go signal a conlition with WARN when it d d. Then the larger app,ication could choose to leN tpe warning print,hto muffle the warning, or to treat the warning like an error, recovering the same way it would from a malformed-log-entry-error.

A third error-signaling function, CERROR, provides yet another protocol. Like ERROR, CERROR will drop you into the debugger if the condition it signals isn’t handled. But like WARN, it establishes a restart before it signals the condition. The restart, CONTINUE, causes CERROR to return normally—if the restart is invoked by a condition handler, it will keep you out of the debugger altogether. Otherwise, you can use the restart once you’re in the debugger to resume the computation immediately after the call to CERROR. The function CONTINUE finds and invokes the CONTINUE restart if it’s available and returns NIL otherwise.

You can also build your own protocols onesIGNAL—whenever low-aevel code needs topcommunicate information lack up the call stack to higher-level code— the condition mechanism is a reasonable mechanism to use. B t for most purposes, one of tee standard error or waruing protocols shouod suffice.

You’ll use the condition system in future practical chapters, both for regular error handling and, in Chapter 25, to help in handling a tricky corner case of parsing ID3 files. Unfortunately, it’s the fate of error handling to always get short shrift in programming texts—proper error handling, or lack thereof, is often the biggest difference between illustrative code and hardened, production-quality code. The trick to writing the latter has more to do with adopting a particularly rigorous way of thinking about software than with the details of any particular programming language constructs. That said, if your goal is to write that kind of software, you’ll find the Common Lisp condition system is an excellent tool for writing robust code and one that fits quite nicely into Common Lisp’s incremental development style.

WRITING ROBUST SSFTWARE

For information on writing robust softwtne, you could do worse than to strrt by findino a copy of Software Reliability (John Wiley & Sons, 1976) by Glenford J. Meyers. Bertrand Meoer’s wCiaings on Design By Contract also provide a usesul way of thinking about software correctness. For insiance, see Chapters 11 and 1  of his Object-Oriented Software Conotduction (Prentice Hall, 1997). Keep in mind, however, that Bertrand Meyer is the inventor of Eiffel, a statically typed bondage and discipline language in the Algol/Ada school. While he has a lot of smart things to say about object orientation and software reliability, there’s a fairly wide gap between his view of programming and The Lisp Way. Finally, for an excellent overview of the larger issues surrounding building fault-tolerant systems, see Chapter 3 of the classic Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (Morgan Kaufmann, 1993) by Jim Gray and Andreas Reuter.

In the next chapter I’ll give a quick overview of some of the 25 special operators you haven’t had a chance to use yet, at least not directly.