Success or Failure

Writing a program could be easily be described as just putting the next step after the other as long as things go well. It is when things are not going well ('fail'), that other actions are needed. Ocean supports three levels of 'failure':

1. 'fail', which means that a step did not succeed, but that this was to expected. All relation symbols use this strategy: the point of comparing 2 entities is that you expect them not to have a certain realtion from time to time.
   'fail' does not know a reason, because in the context there could be only one.
2. 'error', which means that a step did not succeed, but that this should not happen during a normal program run. Failure to allocate a resource is one of the more common errors. An 'error' can report in a special Integer value or a String (or both). Usually such error can be handled locally, even if that entails calling exitProgram().
3. 'exception', which means that a step did not succeed and that it is not expected that the immediate caller can do anything about it, or that the handling of the failure needs additional information.

foo                 ::= bar
                     |  baz

try                ::= try
catch              ::= catch
retry              ::= retry
finally            ::= finally
try-part           ::= try [s] spec [s] [code]...
catch-part         ::= catch s class-id [s] spec [s] [code]...
finally-part       ::= finally [s] spec [s] [code]...
handled-code       ::= try-part catch-part... [finally-part] end [try]

X

x

Exceptions are run in lexical scope where the catch is implemented, but functionaly they are called as a subroutine by raise. This means that the stack has not yet been rewound, so that a 'return' to the function raising the expection is possible. This is done by retry().