converter your reply helped me understand this to every tiny detail, numerous thanks for your effort my fellow monk! ;-)

I didn't expect someone to put up so much effort and explain an answer to my question so thoroughly.

I feel a little dumb now though.. that I failed to understand the concept heh. Actually, it was my first try at subroutine prototypes.

Say, I figure the code could be rewritten as follows:

     try({die "foobar\n"; print "OK";12}, 
         catch {print "FAILED!\n";}
         );
[download]

*laugh* I guess my struggle for Java-like OO-ish exception handling hit back and confused me beyound disbelief. lol ;-)

cheers, vladb

"There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels." -- Confession of Faith