[fpc-pascal] Why opening a file for write fails in fpc 2.6?

[Tomas Hajny]

On Thu, November 1, 2012 00:24, Giuliano Colla wrote:
> Il 31/10/2012 14:45, Jonas Maebe ha scritto:
>> On 31 Oct 2012, at 14:35, Giuliano Colla wrote:
 .
 .
>>> but if it doesn't it's a Delphi bug, I'd say. What are exceptions
>>> there for, if not for telling you that what you requested cannot be
>>> done?
>>
>> There are multiple ways to indicate a failure. Exceptions are a very
>> expensive way for doing so, and generally should only be used in cases
>> that are truly exceptional and/or indicate a fatal error. In other
>> cases, using a special return value is generally much more appropriate.
>>
>>
> My bad. I hadn't realized that low level file operation such as FileOpen
> and FileCreate do not raise an exception on failure. I seldom use them,
> and only in connection with physical devices, where I always take care
> to verify the existence before attempting to read or write. So I just
> relied on a useless try-except construct.
> It's very unlikely that such a failure would permit a program to
> continue running, I'd call it a fatal error, so an exception would be
> welcome, but that's life...

I don't agree with your statement that such an error wouldn't allow the
program to continue running. Vice versa, there are many situations where
the result may be used for a different behaviour of the respective
program. As an example, you may use the return value from FileCreate for
checking whether the user supplied a valid file name in his input to the
program (and ask for another file name afterwards), you may also check
whether you can access the respective file in read/write mode (and thus
allow user to change the file) or you need to stick to read-only mode (and
thus allow just viewing/reading the content), etc.

Tomas