Re: assert, ABORT, and friends

Aidan Kehoe <kehoea(a)parhasard.net&gt; wrote: The trouble is that this particular bit of paranioa does not help preserve the user's data and complicates analysis of the code to boot. More below. It does not preserve more data. Our code base is riddled with code that assumes that ABORT() and failing assert()s do not return. So in a double assertion failure scenario, what is likely to happen is that the second assert_failed() will return, and the code it returns to will immediately do something fatal based on the assumption that a return would not happen. So XEmacs is dead anyway, without having done anything extra to preserve the user's data. We could try to fix the problem by going through the code and handling the case where an ABORT or failed assert() does return. But what are you going to do? Take a look through the code. In most cases, there is nothing sane that can be done, which is exactly why that code is trying to cause an exit. You could try to throw something, but then you lose the stacktrace to the place where the problem actually occurred. My position is that our code base assumes that those functions do not return, therefore we should fix it so that propery is guaranteed. -- Jerry James, Assistant Professor james(a)xemacs.org Computer Science Department http://www.cs.usu.edu/~jerry/ Utah State University