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Dictionary of Electrical Engineering

Commonly used terms in the Electrical industry.

(1) an unusual condition arising during program execution that causes the processor to signal an exception. This signal activates a special exception handler that is designed to handle only this special condition. Division by zero is one exception condition. Some vendors use the term "trap" to denote the same thing.

(2) an event that causes suspension of normal program execution. Types include addressing exception, data exception, operation exception, overflow exception, protection exception, underflow exception. exception handler a special block of system software code that reacts when a specific type of exception occurs. If the exception is for an error that the program can recover from, the program can recover from the error and resume executing after the exception handler has executed. If the programmer does not provide a handler for a given exception, a built-in system exception handler will
usually be called, which will result in terminating the process that caused the exception. Finally, the reaction to exception can be halting of the system. As an example, a bus error handler is the system software responsible for
handling bus error exceptions.