Happy summer to everybody.

When programming in general, and when programming MIDAS, there is always a struggle
with error handling. Too much? Too little? Visually, some MIDAS functions are 90% error handling, 10% useful work, if that.

What is the right way to do this?
Where is the balance?
Would c++ exceptions help or hinder?
How to make it better?

It turns out that the Go community have been struggling with exactly this for the last year or so.

Read the (ultimately rejected) proposal for improved error handling in Go. All the problems and difficulties
and struggles facing the programmer and the language designer spread right in front of us.

https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draft-error-handling-overview.md

(To remember, Go is this: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-go-programming/9780134190570/
The language designers are Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and "some other people"
(Dennis Ritchie is no longer with us). These people gave us UNIX and C (and C++, the C++ guy was
their next-door-office mate), when that crowd speaks, I listen)

That write-up refers to some blogger's vivid illustration how correct error handling is hard,
with special focus on error handling in the presence of exceptions:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=39683
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=36693

I read all this stuff and said, "wow, this is the reader's digest version of my life in computer programming".

The clincher from this last guy? "My point isn’t that exceptions are bad.
My point is that exceptions are too hard and I’m not smart
enough to handle them."

"back to writing some error handling code",
K.O.