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Re: Try/Catch Exception Objects: Possible?

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From:
David Nicol
Date:
July 22, 2013 22:07
Subject:
Re: Try/Catch Exception Objects: Possible?
Message ID:
CAFwScO8+di4BiRn5i094BQBifqQyyKp0wFpe9fc9vQJcuwf-gg@mail.gmail.com
On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 4:44 PM, David E. Wheeler <david@justatheory.com>wrote:

>
> Crazy? Impossible? Terrifying?
>

Have you looked at the way Golang does exceptions? Their documentation
discourages
exception-driven control flow -- everything returns lists, and the
convention is to make the second element the completion status, to avoid
the out-of-band problem of returning special failure values -- but one
could do it with their available tools.

The most important of these tools is a deferred block, which executes at
scope-tear-down time, like CPAN's OnScopeExit or LocalOnExit. They also
have a global exception objectl like Perl's $@, which is loaded with
"panic" and can be consumed with "recover." If Perl were to (1) support a
DEFER block that worked that way and (2) stop clobbering defined $@ (has
that been fixed? I remember discussion about automatically localizing $@ in
DESTROY) until it is consumed by an equivalent to golang's "recover" that
would be, in my opinion, more powerful than adopting the try/catch  idiom
into the core language.

Maybe golang-style panics would be best given their own parallel system,
rather than touching the semantics of $@, no matter how slightly.

In short, I'm opposed to try/catch, as I think it's a tired idiom with
superior alternatives, including what Perl's already got.

-- 
You've got to wiggle before you can crawl

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