improved the handling of g++ and ld flags in Makefiles, implemented exception handling within Python - replaced C++ aborts with exceptions that can be caught by Python
changed release version to 0.8.3
enhanced Visual Studio project for exception handling, minor changes to Makefiles
added a program to test exceptions handling
Merge remote-tracking branch 'upstream/master'

Merge changes with upstream.
Made functions 45 and 46 consistent with each other.