> you can tell if you blew up the stack by setting up an exception handler (or lisp condition or whatever equivalent).
That only works if there's some way to tell whether the stack blew up (as you say: catching exceptions, lisp conditions, or whatever equivalent). I'd put those language features in the 'messy' category: useful on occasion; not used by most code; makes all code harder to reason about (hence the subjective "reasonably-unobservable" category above)
That only works if there's some way to tell whether the stack blew up (as you say: catching exceptions, lisp conditions, or whatever equivalent). I'd put those language features in the 'messy' category: useful on occasion; not used by most code; makes all code harder to reason about (hence the subjective "reasonably-unobservable" category above)