I still maintain that the use of try and catch logic in Java (and where used, C++) makes programmers lazy. Having to check for error return codes at the point of the failure means the programmer will get in the habit of writing error recovery code.

I've seen tons of (and here is the key) badly written Java code that hits an exception and the whole program dies a horrible death with a stack trace, caught by some try/catch block that is not sufficiently fine grained.

I rarely see this problem in C apps, where even novice programmers usually have the discipline to check return codes. In conclusion, I feel that in many cases try/catch is a crutch. Rewrite it to use standard if logic if you can. Eval has uses, but this is more of a hack than a good use. Yes, despite being a young coder punk, I'm rather old school in my software development approaches :)

I know, you are saying this is ok in Perl and is a good idiom -- I'm just saying, it's dangerous as heck and not conducive to error recovery. Error reporting and error recovery are different things, and the latter is a lost art.

In reply to Re: Re: Perl etiquette - eval by flyingmoose
in thread Perl etiquette - eval by elbow

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