try/catch block in Arduino

try-catch arduino
NZal picture NZal · Apr 19, 2012 · Viewed 51.2k times · Source

I am working with socket communication in Arduino, and I need the try/catch block for proper handling, what do you guys suggest? My search on the internet wasn't successful.

edit:

The code I am working with uses the WiFly module to interact with a mobile application, I am building a robot module with some controls over mobile application using Android. Everything works just fine, but sometimes the socket gets disconnected, so I need to add handling for such cases, something similar to try/catch block, but I didn't find similar block for Arduino.

My code:

void loop() {
    Client client = server.available();
    if (client) {
        while (client.connected()) {
            if (client.available()) {
                // Serial.print("client connected \n");
                char c = client.read();

                if(c == 'L')
                    turnLeft();
                if(c == 'R')
                    turnRight();
                if(c == 'F')
                    goForward();
                if(c == 'B')
                    goBackward();
                if(c == 'S')
                    Stop();

                Serial.print(c);
            }
        }

        // give the web browser time to receive the data
        delay(100);
        client.stop();
    }
}

Answer

vikingosegundo picture vikingosegundo · Apr 19, 2012

The Arduino reference is not listing try catch (for details of why see, for example, this related answer). And I assume, that implementing try catch on a µ-controller could be kind of difficult/impossible.

Try catch in most languages is a quite expensive operation: The program stack get copied once for the try block and for each catch block. In case the try goes wrong the try-block stack will be discarded and one of the catch block stacks will be executed.
I am not an expert of cpu architecture, but I can imagine, that this needs a lot of memory swapping and similar operations — it should be hard to achieve with a simple µ-controller.

It might worth to look how C-Programmers do patterns similar to try/catch

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