Re: Eclipse 3.0

[Andrew Haley]

Andrew John Hughes writes:

 > I'm more for an Error throw rather than an Exception, simply
 > because bad calling code may just swallow exceptions.  I don't
 > think any of it will expect NotImplemented, and we need something
 > that will unavoidably spit out the result of calling a dead method.

Exactly right, this is *extremely* important.

 > Breaking parts of Classpath that 'work' doesn't sound like a thrilling
 > prospect, but its something that needs to be done if we are going to get
 > to an acceptable implementation.

Yes.  Skeleton methods that just don't work are an unmitigated evil,
and shouldn't be committed to our tree.  Not existing at all is best,
throwing an Error is second best.

I have wasted so much time tracking down failures in Classpath to a
dummy method (saying "FIXME: implement the spec") that should have
simply failed to link at runtime.  It would have saved me hours.
Days, even.

 > Mark's problems with Eclipse just show the problems that occur when
 > you have to find errors in two large codebases, and Classpath is
 > swallowing the error that would give the game away.

Exactly.

Andrew.