Aborting Messages

Q: I would like to abort a computation whenever an error occurs, avoiding evaluation of the subsequent expressions within a cell. For example, in the following computation, I would like to avoid computing after generates an error message.

One can immediately abort a computation by replacing the default for $Messages with a call to Abort.

However, now when an error occurs, the computation is aborted without any message.

Is there a way to display the message and then abort?

A: Omega Consulting (omegaconsultinggroup.com) answers: Using is quite a creative trick. Unfortunately, you cannot use it and also get the message. $Messages is a list of OutputStreams that any messages are written to. First, let us restore $Messages to its default value.

If the OutputStream is stdout, then you get the normal message. If it is an OutputStream to a file, then it is written to that file. You might think that the following would work:

However, it does not.

Why not? Because $Messages is evaluated before the messages are actually sent to the streams. Again, we restore $Messages to its default value.

Still there is another trick we can use, called a trap. A message is created whenever the Message function is called. We can redefine this function by unprotecting it.

Now we create a global variable, $AbortMessage, to indicate what we want to do with a Message. When the variable is True, we want to deviate from the default behavior. When False, we want the default behavior (i.e., a message).

Now we add a definition for when the variable is True. It calls Message with the variable set to False (creating a message) and then aborts.

To be safe we reprotect Message.

Now we try it.