Re: Attaching context info to an error

[Stefan Monnier]

> That's got no connection with what I wrote.  What I'm asking you to
> confirm is that you're not contemplating introducing error handling
> machinery which, during bootstrap, will only work after Lisp code has
> been loaded.

The idea is:

- In the short term, provide new functions that allow manipulating
  errors in a way that's independent from their representation
  (as cons cells).
  Hopefully this will make the code also more readable in many cases.
  E.g. (error-resignal ERR) instead of (signal (car ERR) (cdr ERR)).

- In the longer term once enough code has been adapted to use the new
  functions, we may be able to consider changing the representation of
  error objects.  Presumably error objects would then be changed from

      (list ERROR-TYPE DATA1 DATA2 ...)

  to something like

      (record ERROR-TYPE DATA1 DATA2 ...)

  This shouldn't require anything tricky during bootstrapping.
  But in any case we're pretty damn far from this.  I'd estimate that we
  have at least 10 years ahead of us to decide if and how we want to
  make that change.


-- Stefan