Lambda the Ultimate

I've been lurking on these forums for a couple years now, and you guys have really pushed my interest in programming languages. I recently graduated college with a bachelor's in computer science, minoring in math. Now I'm taking a year off before I go to grad school, hopefully to get my Ph.D. I would like to pursue areas of overlap between abstract math and computer science in general, and programming language theory in particular. For example, I would like to study category theory as it applies to functional languages, and how to formalize methods of abstraction. I would also like to study type systems, and perhaps their connections to formal logic systems and theorem proving.

This being a fairly specific area of study, I've had trouble doing research on grad schools. I know a lot of you are in academia, and I would really like to get some advice on what schools have good programs and good faculty. Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

Patrick Schultz

Some kind of language support for error handling (e.g exceptions of various kinds, on error blocks, Maybe types, continuations etc.) has become standard. The exact mechanism is yet another language design decision designers have to make.

Eric Lippert describes VBScript's error handling mechanims. The VBScript approach is perhaps more confusing than it has to be (though I personally didn't find Eric's examples confusing). Tying exception handlers to blocks is more structured and perhaps better.

Be that as it may, I think better error handling constructs are still waiting to be discovered (or designed).