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5.1.4 Error Management

Let’s take a short break in our Clon extension process. We have seen that Clon may throw errors in different situations, including invalid arguments or values. The end-user manual advertises that the interactive error handler offers a set of “options to fix problems” (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, please read Error Management in The Clon End-User Manual and you will know). Well, you may have guessed that these options are simply “restarts” (of course, we don’t use that term there, as we wouldn’t want to frighten the casual user, or would we?).

When you ship your application, you are encouraged to disable the debugger in the standalone executable because that also might scare the casual user a little bit (the end-user manual only mentions the none error-handler to explain that people shouldn’t use it). The way error handling is done in Common Lisp standalone executables is implementation-dependent, so please refer to your favorite compiler’s documentation. More generally, the behavior of Common Lisp standalone executables may depend on:

• the state of the Lisp environment when the application was dumped, which may in turn depend on command-line options passed to the Lisp itself (see Dumping Executables),
• the arguments passed to the dumping function (look at Clon’s dump macro to see what it does),
• worse: both.

No, really, Common Lisp is no fun at all.