I'm in a dilemma here. At work, we have a lot of C programmers, and hence they like to code their Perl code in sort of a C-ish way. Which is fine in most cases, but there's one thing that I just fail to see the benefit, and that is an idiom that they use:

  sub myfunc {
    ...
    return eval {
       # do bunch of things here...
       if($err_condition) {
          die "error";
       }
       return 1;
    }
  }

[download]

So basically they want to make it such that you can check the return value and check $@ in an errono-like fashion. Which is fine, but it just strikes me as really, really odd.

I just fail to see how it could be better than just simply raising an exception. Why can't I just die()?

If I'm to try and use a simple die/croak instead, I'm going to have to convince a lot of people... Otherwise if I'm going to have to live with it, I want to make sure that I understand the benefits, and that we're not alone in using this.

In all honesty, I may just be too deep into all the Perl-isms, and that I'm missing something obvious. If there are other people who use this idiom, I would realy like to know, and also, why? What advantages do you gain?

TIA.

In reply to return eval { die() } idiom by lestrrat

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