Try Catch

rascal-0.40.17

Synopsis

Try to execute a statement and catch resulting exceptions.

Syntax

try
   Statement₁
catch Pattern₁ :
  Statement₂
catch Pattern₂ : {
  Statements
}
catch: 
  Statement₃
finally: Statement₄

Description

A try catch statement has as purpose to catch any Exceptions that are raised during the execution of Statement₁. These exceptions may caused by:

• The execution of an explicit Throw statement.

• The Rascal system that discovers an abnormal condition, e.g., an out of bounds error when accessing a list element.

Note that all elements of the try catch statement are optional but that at least one has to be present. Their meaning is as follows:

• If a Pattern matches, the corresponding action is executed. This is a statement after the : which can be a Block

• Otherwise, the default catch: executes Statement₃.

• If a finally is present, before leaving the try catch statement Statement₄ is always executed (when present). This is true also when the code is terminated with Return, Break, Continue or Fail.

Examples

Let's define a variant of the head function that returns the first element of a list, but throws an exception when the list is empty. Our variant will return 0 for an empty list:

rascal>import List;
ok
rascal>import Exception;
ok
rascal>int hd(list[int] x) { try return head(x); catch: return 0; }
int (list[int]): function(|prompt:///|(0,60,<1,0>,<1,60>))
rascal>hd([1,2,3]);
int: 1
rascal>hd([]);
int: 0

We can also be more specific and catch the EmptyList exception (which is available here since we have imported the Exception module):

rascal>int hd2(list[int] x) { try return head(x); catch EmptyList(): return 0; }
int (list[int]): function(|prompt:///|(0,73,<1,0>,<1,73>))
rascal>hd2([]);
int: 0