[Swift-devel] New built-in system, request for comments

[Mihael Hategan]

On Sat, 2014-04-05 at 20:11 -0500, Michael Wilde wrote:

> Regarding treating function failures like app failures: I dont think 
> thats good in the case of functions.  

I am of the relatively strong opinion that we should not make it easy to
overlook errors. The c style errno or the bash style $? are not what I
consider in line with best language design practices, and most languages
past 1990-ish have dealt away with that scheme. The reason is that it is
very rare that an ignored error is intentional. It is more likely the
result of a problem that should be caught sooner rather than later.

I do though think that we should have exceptions. I believe they are the
clean way to address this issue.

Also, I would like to note that all current functions (and pretty much
everything in swift) fail on failure instead of returning some magic
value. System() would be the only exception.

Mihael