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9.3 Classifying failure

A Libmarpa application programming failure, unless specified otherwise, is an irrecoverable failure. Once an irrecoverable failure has occurred, the further behavior of the program is undefined. Nonetheless, we specify, and Libmarpa attempts, diagnostics behaviors (see Application and diagnostic behavior) in an effort to handle irrecoverable failures as smoothly as possible.

A Libmarpa application programming failure is recoverable if and only if it is specified as such.

A failure is called a hard failure is it has an error code associated with it. A recoverable failure is called a soft failure if it has no associated error code. (For more on error codes, see Error codes.)

All failures fall into one of five types. In order of severity, these are