Ignoring an error

So, in my last post I made a case for leaving automatic error handling turned on. I also made the statement:


To be clear, what I’m /not/ saying is that you should USE automatic error handling. That’s a pretty bad idea; you should always do proper error handling.

So what’s the difference? If you’re intentionally not wiring your error terminal to something and you have automatic error handling turned on, then you’re choosing to invoke automatic error handling. As an example of a particularly bad choice, consider the following:

In case the above isn’t obvious, it’s not uncommon to get a timeout (Error 56) on a TCP read. What you don’t want is a modal dialog that causes your program to abort execution every time you get said timeout. So, you say, since we’re not turning off automatic error handling, what should we do?

I’m glad you asked! In short, we need to wire the output error terminal to the input of something. We have a few options here.

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