Influences on the design of exception handling ACM SIGSOFT project on the impact of software engineering research on programming language design

Abstract

There has long been a close association between research in software engineering and the design of programming languages. Part of the IMPACT project involves an exploration of the interrelations of these two fields and documentation in a report of how fundamental research in software engineering has been a valuable resource for programming language features commonly used today. The resulting report investigates the relationship by considering features in currently used languages, including exceptions, control and data abstractions, types, inheritance, concurrency and visualization mechanisms.This paper, exerpted from the report, focuses on the influence of software engineering research on the development of exceptions. The paper demonstrates that there is a symbiotic relationship between software engineering research and the design of exception handing in programming languages. Publication of these partial results is aimed at soliciting feedback and comments from both the programming languages and software engineering communities.