This paper discusses the cooperation exception handling model that comes along with a mechanism for multi-party interaction, in order to support the development of robust distributed applications running over a local area network. Lessons learnt from this work and its relation with today's common practice in the area of distributed computing are further considered.

Language Constructs Termination exception mechanisms like in Ada and C++ are supposed to terminate an unsuccessful computation as soon as possible after an exception occurs. However, none of the examples of numeric exception handling presented earlier depends ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, Vol. 18, No. 2, March 1996. Handling Floating-Point Exceptions 167 on the immediate termination of a calculation signaling an exception. The IEEE exception flags scheme actually takes advantage of the fact that an immediate jump is not necessary; by raising a flag, making a substitution, and continuing, the IEEE Standard supports both an attempted/alternate form and a default substitution with a single, simple reponse to exceptions. A detraction of the IEEE flag solution, though, is its obvious lack of structure. Instead of being forced to set and reset flags, one would ideally have available a language construct that more directly reflected the attempted/alternate algorit...

this article differentiate the exception-handling needs of CB-RTS as compared to other software paradigms and can serve as a driving force for future research into exception-handling technology.

New software architectures based on multi-agents or software components allow the integration of separately developed software pieces that interact through various communication schemes. In such a context, reliability raises new important issues. This paper aims at increasing reliability in multi-agent systems (MASs) and, therefore, focuses on the study of an appropriate exception handling system (EHS). The issues specific to exception handling in MASs -- preservation of the agent paradigm and support of cooperative concurrency -- are presented and discussed. This paper analyses existing EHSs according to these issues and describes our proposition, the Sage system, which integrates various solutions from existing EHSs and adapts them to the agent paradigm. Sage is an exception handling system dedicated to MASs that addresses the stressed issues by providing means to coordinate the collective activities of agents, to embbed contextualized handlers in agents and to concert exceptions. It has been implemented and integrated in the MadKit MAS. It has been experimented with a classical travel agency case study.

A++ (‘‘Annotated C++’’) is both a formalism and a proposed CASE tool for annotating C++ code with object-oriented specifications, assertions, and related semantic information. Annotations provide programmers with a useful means for approaching class design, exceptions, correctness, standardization, software reusability and related issues in software engineering with C++. This paper shows how A++ provides arbitrarily fine granularity to the C++ type system, how it automates and streamlines exception testing, how it can aid in standardization of software components, and how it can safely remove redundant exception tests.

This paper presents a general model for dealing with abnormal events during program execution and describes how this model is implemented in the System. (The System is a library of C definitions that provide light-weight concurrency on uniprocessor and multiprocessor computers running the UNIX operating system. ) Two different techniques can be used to deal with an abnormal event: an exception, which results in an exceptional change in control flow from the point of the abnormal event; and an intervention, which is a routine call from the point of the abnormal event that performs some corrective action. Users can define named exceptions and interventions in conjunction with ones defined by the System. Exception handlers and intervention routines for dealing with abnormal events can be defined/installed at any point in a program. An exception or intervention can then be raised or called, passing data about the abnormal event and returning results for interventions. Interventions can also be activated in other tasks, like a UNIX signal. Such asynchronous interventions may interrupt a task's execution and invoke the specified intervention routine. Asynchronous interventions are found to be useful to get another task's attention when it is not listening through the synchronous mechanism

Exception handling is widely regarded as a necessity in programming languages today, and almost every programming language currently used for professional software development supports some form of it. However, spreadsheet systems, which may be the most widely used type of "programming language" today in terms of number of users using it to create "programs" (spreadsheets), have traditionally had only extremely limited support for exception handling. Spreadsheet system users range from end users to professional programmers, and this wide range suggests that an approach to exception handling for spreadsheet systems needs to be compatible with the equational reasoning model of spreadsheet formulas, yet feature expressive power comparable to that found in other programming languages.

Abstract: Exception handling is a very popular technique for incorporating fault tolerance into software systems. However, its use for structuring concurrent, distributed systems is hindered by the fact that the exception handling models of many mainstream object-oriented programming languages are sequential. In this paper we present an aspect-based framework for incorporating concurrent exception handling in Java programs. The framework has been implemented in AspectJ, a general purpose aspect-oriented extension to Java. Our main contribution is to show that AspectJ is useful for implementing the concerns related to concurrent exception handling and to provide a useful tool to developers of distributed, concurrent fault-tolerant applications.

A++ ("Annotated C++") is both a formalism and a proposed CASE tool for annotating C++ code with object-oriented specifications, assertions, and related semantic information. Annotations provide programmers with a useful means for approaching class design, exceptions, correctness, standardization, software reusability and related issues in software engineering with C++. This paper shows how A++ provides arbitrarily fine granularity to the C++ type system, how it automates and streamlines exception testing, how it can aid in standardization of software components, and how it can safely remove redundant exception tests. 1. Introduction A++ ("Annotated C++") is presented in [1] as both a formalism and a proposed CASE tool for extending C++ with object-oriented annotations. In the present paper,webriefly describe A++ (mainly by example), and then discuss how A++ can be of practical utility in the construction of well-specified, correct, robust, efficient, standardized, and reusable C++ cla...

Run-time services like accurate garbage collection and exception handling require static information about programs that is available only at compile-time. Compilers that use o#-the-shelf code generators cannot easily produce such information and this severely limits the implementation choices for the run-time system. C-- is a portable compiler-target language that includes support for high-level run-time systems. This paper extends C-- to support languages which have a foreign function interface. Further we generalize C-- to support more e#cient implementations of garbage collection.