The first example, to me, is an example of how not to use try-catch. To me, you shouldn't be doing a return 0 within a catch. You should be rethrowing some error after doing what you needed to do. The only return statement should be as a result of success. Regardless of memory leaks, that's just poor practice.

I think that's a rather broad statement. Many people (myself included) think that multiple-returns can make code a lot clearer in some circumstances. For example, while you could rewrite this with a single return

sub find {
    my ($self, $search_item) = @_;
    eval {

        # skip expensive search if item not stored anywhere
        return unless $search_item->stored;

        # otherwise do expensive search
        $self->first;
        while (my $item = $self->next) {
            return 1 if $item == $search_item;
        };
        return;
        
    }; if ($@) {
        ... handle exceptions here ...
    };
};

[download]

I would argue that it would be harder to grok than the version above.

For me the main problem with Error is the fact that wrapping a bit of code in a catch block shouldn't change its semantics. This can lead to really odd behaviour when fiddling with exception based code.

In reply to Re^6: Learning how to use the Error module by example by adrianh
in thread Learning how to use the Error module by example by cleverett

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