Proposal: Automatic Resource Management

[Neal Gafter]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 11:08 AM, Joshua Bloch <jjb at google.com> wrote:
>>  Particularly concerning to me is
>> the fact that this translation would sometimes silently swallow
>> exceptions indicating serious program failures
>
> Unless I am missing something, the construct only "silently swallows"
> exceptions when they are intentionally suppressed in favor of prior
> exceptions, which typically indicate more serious problems.

The language construct as you specified it has no way to determine
which exception is more serious.  For example, a VM failure, such as
an out-of-memory condition on the close(), is more serious than a
closed connection on a particular write.  The "solution" you proposed
for this is unlikely to help.  I understand that this was intentional
on your part, but it is still a serious problem with the proposal that
should be called out.