Language Design: Unified Condition Expressions

Exceptions

A reasonable question that might be asked is whether this design can be extended to also handle thrown exceptions, and whether such an extension could completely replace the try-catch-finally idiom.

One language that has done something similar is Ocaml, which has extended its pattern matching syntax/semantics.

One option might be something along the lines of

if readPersonFromFile(file)
  throws[IOException]($ex)        then "unknown, due to $ex"
  is Person("Alice", _)           then "alice"
  is Person(_, $age) && age >= 18 then "adult"
                                  else "minor"

This might require adding some amount of language magic to deal with the throws construct though, depending on the expressiveness of the core language.

Considering the costs and the complexity involved, it may be a better approach to simply drop exceptions from the design of the language and do without this additional layer of control flow.