“Sometimes, cleverness is not a virtue.”

Sometimes, the products of “cleverness” prove to be quite uncontrollable.

In my humble opinion, BEGIN blocks are one of those things.   And, if we then try to “intercept” them, so as to prevent them from doing what we don’t want them to do in this-case or that, “well, we have only made matters worse, haven’t we?”

I prize one characteristic of good source code above all others: clarity.   In such code, I am able to quickly read the code and to ascertain, with a very high degree of confidence, that I actually know what it is actually telling the computer to do, and that the computer will actually interpret it in just that way.   This idea of “intercepts” would, IMHO, unfortunately just serve to make the code even more inscrutable than it already may be.

Of course I do not mean the foregoing to be “a blanket statement, true in every case as though it were inscribed by a divine hand in some stone tablets.”   Instead, call it a rule-of-thumb, offered by a thumb that has been whacked with a hammer too many times.