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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@m... 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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