Traps

The call_with_trap operation is a special variant of a call in which an exception handling trap is established and then the procedure called on the given argument.

Inside the procedure an error handling procedure is defined and passed to client code.

The client code can then use throw_continuation to throw the error handler. The error handler is then called in the context of the call_with_trap which should be the context of its definition.

call_with_trap {
  proc ehandler() {
    eprintln("BATCH MODE ERROR HANDLER");
    result = 1;
    goto err;
   }
   result = runit(ehandler);
 err:>
};
proc runit (ehandler: 1->0) {
  throw_continuation ehandler;
}

In this case the error handler does a non-local goto to exit, and jumps to a label at the end of the anonymous procedure which was called with a trap, then that procedure exits normally.

Continuations can be thrown inside functions, and are implemented with a C++ throw which unwinds the machine stack. However procedures use a spaghetti stack consisting of heap allocated stack frames. The top level scheduler guards invocations of procedural continuations with a C++ catch clause, however compiler generated procedure calls may elide the guard for performance reasons.

The call_with_trap operation ensures the system scheduler handles the call of the procedure, instead of optimised generated code.

When the scheduler guard catches a continuation, it discards the currently running continuation of the current fibre, and replaces it with the continuation which it caught.

Be sure to use both throws and long jumps with care as neither are intrinsically safe in the following sense: it is possible to throw or jump to code in a continuation which has already exited. A non-local goto resets the continuations program counter to the selected target and executes the exhausted frame until it returns. However the return has already been taken. The system may choose to zero out the return address of a frame when it returns, in which case a second return will terminate the fibre .. but not before it reaches the return instruction.