I thought about it and came to the conclusion that most
of the time, if I'm given a totally wrong type of input
(scalar when I expected a hashref, or something similar),
it is a rare case that the program can recover gracefully.
Even if you could recover gracefully from wrong
input, it's probably a bad idea. If you get wrong input,
then somewhere along the line someone screwed up, and about
the worst thing you can do is hide the problem (or at least
pass it on to another chunk of code further away from the
original) and make it harder to debug. That sort of false
"defensive programming" isn't just a waste of time, it's
actively harmful.
In general, I like to write code that fails --
gracefully, mind you, not locking up the machine or any
such -- as soon as possible on bad assumptions. Makes it
easier to find bugs.
--
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Found a typo in this node? /msg me
The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!
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