* Graham Barr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-08-11 03:05]: > On Aug 9, 2008, at 8:38 PM, Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote: >> * Todd Rinaldo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-08-10 03:35]: >>> What alternatives do you recommend? >> >> See Tom Heady’s reply on this thread. > > Which also as issues, albeit maybe fewer.
Yes, it will fail in some very rare cases. However, it does so loudly and predictably. In contrast, FindBin tries to avoid failing by employing heuristics, and as we all know that is a fancy word for saying “it doesn’t work.” Unsurprisingly, when it fails, it fails silently with bizarre results – as it did for Gabor. Both failure modes are very rare, which means FindBin almost never needs to fall back on heuristics, which is why people tend to think I’m just nitpicking when I point out that it’s broken as designed and should not be used. But I dislike software that can fail silently with bizarre results as a matter of principle. And when the heuristic is there to catch an almost irrelevant failure mode, its extremely disproportionate surprise potential just isn’t worth it, IMO. > IIRC when FindBin was written there were some system where $0 > was not a full path when the script was invoked via PATH, which > was why FindBin was implemented to do the PATH search. But that > was over a decade ago and I cannot remember which OS it was on, > so who knows if it is still in use today. I guess it might make some sense under those circumstances. But in that case it should have done the PATH search only on affected platforms, not everywhere. (Ideally it would specifically probe, if possible in any way, for whether the heuristic was needed.) Anyway, shoulda coulda woulda… that horse has long left the barn. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
