æʃliŋ, sonic rush purropawgandist @aescling@cat.family

@Satsuma @wallhackio i do not remember this story i’m just astounded at how obviously bad that idea is

@wallhackio bruh

@amy *absol voice* nyaaaaaaaa

@wallhackio anyway here is something i think about that to me complicates the nomenclature at play here

now, this is not the entirety of use cases fur exception handling, but a very compelling use case fur exceptions is to handle impawsible situations about as gracefully as pawsible—even if by just crashing. the way erlang does, i guess. put a pin in that

consider you are using a strongly typed language with algebraic data structures, in which it is natural to define a data type that represents an abstract syntax trees. assuming there are no bugs in the AST definition, any construction you can make in the AST that type checks is a syntactically valid statement in the language you are writing an AST fur

so, imagine trying to compile source code whose contents entirely consist of constructing an AST in this language. if this fails to compile, you are trying to repurresent a local impawsibility, and the compiler will stop execution

is it a valid way to think about compilation in general in these same terms? is a compiler error better thought of as an expected result, or as an error state resulting from the compiler being forced into a logically impawsible state by the context in which it is oppurrating? which is to say, is it valid to conceive of compile time errors as the compiler assuming it is oppurrating in a logically consistent world, and exploding in response to a discovered inconsistency?

controversial!

@wallhackio ​

@chr this was a great post imo

@monorail is this a joke of some kind

@vaporeon_ ​

@wallhackio huh

@wallhackio what if the implementation throws runtime exceptions as the most convenient way of short-circuiting on discovering an error?

@wallhackio (which is to say, you think that? because, pedantically speaking, compilers have runtimes, and can absol-utely throw exceptions during that runtime)

@clarfonthey seeing this exact usage elsewhere is why i made this poll, because i disagree with the usage but think explaining exactly why is tricky to do in a satisfying way

@wallhackio compilers don’t have runtimes?

@vaporeon_ i’m entirely sure if i agree not but but i like this answer