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A soft failure is a recoverable Libmarpa application programming failure that has no error code associated with it. Hard errors are assigned error codes in order to tell them apart. Error codes are not necessary or useful for soft errors, because there is at most one type of soft failure per Libmarpa method.
Soft failures are so called, because they are the least severe kind of failure. The most severe failures are “bugs” — unintended, and a symptom of a problem. Soft failures, on the other hand, are a frequent occurrence in normal, successful, processing. In the phrase “soft failure”, the word “failure” is used in the same sense that its cognate “fail” is used when we say that a loop terminates when it “fails” its loop condition. That ”failure” is the failure of a condition necessary to continue on a main branch of processing, and a signal to proceed on another branch.
It is expected that Libmarpa applications will be designed such that successful execution requires handling soft failures. In fact, a non-trivial Libmarpa application can hardly be designed except on that basis.