> Philosophically - I strongly disagree with the concept of ever using "croak" on broken input - that's a fast-track way to derail production code... but that's just my opinion (based on a mere 37 years of programming every day).

Since you have no code to show us, let's discuss your problem "philosophically".

First, as pointed out by a bona fide programming legend, programming every day for 37 years does not mean you are any good at it. The key is deliberative practice, not just doing it over and over again:

Researchers (Bloom (1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes (1989), Simmon & Chase (1973)) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967.

Second, as noted at Two Different Languages: Two Similar Books (PBP and CCS), Perl expert Damian Conway and C++ experts Andrei Alexandrescu and Herb Sutter all agree that throwing exceptions is indeed a sound way to report errors:

Conway further illustrates this specific Perl best practice with an illustrative example (number 8) which uses block eval and Carp's croak.

Admittedly, Exception handling in general is a difficult and controversial topic. Golang, for example, was initially released with exception handling explicitly omitted because the designers felt it obfuscated control flow - though the exception-like panic/recover mechanism was later added.

See also: Reflections on Skills of the Skillful

In reply to Re: Can someone please write a *working* JSON module by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread Can someone please write a *working* JSON module by cnd

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