here is a great post from Owen Taylor in 1999 after this idea was repeatedly raised for the "g" stack on Linux:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-list/1999-December/msg0...

it kept coming up, too: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2001-February/...

Here is what GLib 2.0 ended up with instead, which works well: http://developer.gnome.org/glib/2.31/glib-Error-Reporting.ht...