Put Errors into an Error Hierarchy

[dthor]

I was reading this Idea regarding clearing specific errors and I thought to myself, "Labview has a whole bunch of error codes, it would be nice if I could easily choose which ones to ignore or raise." As AQ said in that thread:

"is very very hard to know all the possible errors that an given function can generate".

My Idea is to create an Error Hierarchy so that a set or subset of error types can easily be ignored or raised. The list of general LabVIEW error codes is about 100 long, and some of them are related. For example, Error 1008: "Cannot Load connector pane" and Error 1012: "Cannot load block diagram" are both related to loading VIs. These two, along with others, could be grouped together. And then there are all the custom error codes that VI makers create.

I'm imagining something like Python's Exception Hierarchy, which allows the programmer to fine-tune his error handling. Here's a snippit of the PEH:

BaseException
 +-- SystemExit
 +-- KeyboardInterrupt
 +-- GeneratorExit
 +-- Exception
      +-- StopIteration
      +-- StandardError
      |    +-- BufferError
      |    +-- ArithmeticError
      |    |    +-- FloatingPointError
      |    |    +-- OverflowError
...

How do people feel about this? I think it might be a fairly major overhaul to the error system, but I think it will also allow people to more easily handle errors - which means more people actually handle errors properly.

[dthor]

I think in order to do this properly, the error bundle would have to be changed to a class. I wonder how nicely that would play with others...

[Darren]

Any idea that has not received any kudos within a year after posting will be automatically declined.