Today, I finished going through the simple mistakes that Bill had found in my thesis. There still are a lot of comments to address; he really gave me a lot of feedback. Thanks, Bill!
One comment that was particularly important was the question: “What happens if an exception is thrown in a predicate?” I never thought of that. Up until now, the exception would unwind the stack and terminate the program. That’s probably not what the programmer wants, though; generally, I designed the predicate checks to be as invisible as possible.
An exception in a predicate should be treated as an error, but it’s a particular kind of error: An error in the code that is there to check the behavior of the program! What I did this afternoon was add a try { ... } catch(Throwable t) { ... } block around every predicate check. If an exception is thrown, then a different log method is invoked. The exception is noted but consumed, and program execution continues.
