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At 6:40 PM -0500 2/27/04, Karl Waclawek wrote:
>I admit I am not a native speaker, but IMO the wording above
>would not contradict the behaviour of an exception stopping
>the parser cold. Exceptions are normally thought of as
>the "exceptional" case, and documenting the behaviour of an
>implementation does usually not imply that it will behave
>the same when an exception is thrown.
>
A very good point. However, I think the sort of exception you're
describing is only a truly exceptional exception such as an I/O error
like a broken socket or an out of memory condition. I'm not sure a
malformed document qualifies as exceptional in this context. There's
no reason, after all, the parse method has to throw an exception to
indicate malformedness. It could easily have returned a boolean
indicating whether or not the document was well-formed. Not that I'm
suggesting such a change at this late date, of course. I just want to
point out that there are other ways to design such an API that don't
rely on exceptions. In practice I encounter malformed documents far
more often than I/O errors, out of memory errors, and similar
problems. They just don't feel that exceptional to me.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
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