Error handling and exceptions
Instantiation errors
An instantiation error is thrown if an argument is not sufficiently instantiated.
Critically, an instantiation error cannot be replaced by silent failure: Failing in such cases would mean that there is no solution, whereas an instantiation error means that an instance of the argument may participate in a solution.
This is in contrast to—for example—domain error, which can be replaced by silent failure without changing the declarative meaning of a program.
General points about error handling
Prolog features exceptions, which are part of the Prolog ISO standard.
An exception can be thrown with throw/1, and caught with catch/3.
The ISO standard defines many cases in which errors must or may be thrown. The standardized exceptions are all of the form error(E,_), where E indicates the error. Examples are instantiation_error, domain_error and type_error, which see.
An important predicate in connection with exceptions is setup_call_cleanup/3, which see.
Cleaning up after exceptions
The predicate setup_call_cleanup/3, which is currently being considered for inclusion in the Prolog ISO standard and provided by an increasing number of implementations, lets us ensure that resources are correctly freed after an exception is thrown.
A typical invocation is:
setup_call_cleanup(open(File, Mode, Stream), process_file(File), close(Stream))Note that an exception or interrupt may even occur immediately after open/3 is called in this case. For this reason, the Setup phase is performed atomically. In Prolog systems that only provide call_cleanup/2, this is much harder to express.
Type and domain errors
A type error occurs if an argument is not of the expected type. Examples of types are:
integeratomlist.
If the predicate is of the expected type, but outside the expected domain, then a domain error is raised.
For example, a domain error is admissible if an integer between 0 and 15 is expected, but the argument is the integer 20.
Declaratively, a type or domain error is equivalent to silent failure, since no instantiation can make a predicate whose argument is of the wrong type or domain succeed.