Andre van Tonder <xxxxxx@now.het.brown.edu> writes:

> Sure, but this can be done without giving the programmer procedural
> access to the information displayed in the exception's stack trace.

This reduces functionality. Sometimes it's essential to display the
stack trace in a different way than dumping it to stderr and dying.
E.g. a CGI script might want to format it into a HTML page with proper
headers, and a GUI application might want to display it in a window.

I can only agree that specifying how much information is available in
a stack trace might be overspecifying as far as the language standard
is concerned, because different implementation strategies may lead to
different amount of information easily available, and it's not that
essential aspect to influence how the language is compiled if it was
always required in a partiocular form.

So this can be an implementation-specific extension. A semi-portable
specification might leave some aspects unspecified.

--
   __("<         Marcin Kowalczyk
   \__/       xxxxxx@knm.org.pl
    ^^     http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/