Two questions for you.
  1. Why should your user code make assumptions for you about whether or not undef is a valid value? That implies a knowledge of your internals that I don't like.
  2. Compare two coding standards. One says that it is the responsibility of calling code to test for possible error returns and the other says it is the responsibility of the code being called to test and throw exceptions. Which is more likely to happen without error? In which can you put better error messages?
Feel free to convince me otherwise, but my current thinking is quite clearly that it is better to throw exceptions early. User behaviour that didn't want that can trap it with eval BLOCK. (Similarly I consider it the responsibility of functions to do something useful in both array and scalar context.)

BTW the shortcomings of C have a lot to do with my attitudes on throwing exceptions versus making it the responsibility of the called code to process possible error returns. For a particularly bad example, consider EAGAIN. It is well-documented. A ton of system calls can return it. But in practice it almost never gets returned, that aspect of code never gets tested, and so that aspect of code tends to be particularly buggy. The result? A Unix system runs fine for months on end. Then you put it under unusual load, once, and key long-running processes wind up with messed up states. Right when you least wanted that. And it isn't just one or two badly written programs that do that. There are lots of them out there.

Now there are reasons why EAGAIN exists, legitimate reasons. Given what a Unix kernel has to do, I am not going to argue that it shouldn't exist. But that is a reliability flaw that I don't think should be introduced lightly.

In reply to Re (tilly) 4: To sub or not to sub, that is the question? by tilly
in thread To sub or not to sub, that is the question? by tachyon

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