Re: Warnings, strict, and CPAN (Re: Closures and default lexical-scope for subs)

[Bart Lateur]

On Wed, 21 Feb 2001 17:32:50 -0500 (EST), Sam Tregar wrote:

>On Wed, 21 Feb 2001, Bart Lateur wrote:
>
>> Actually, it's pretty common. Only, most languages are not as forgiving
>> as perl, and what is merely a warning in Perl, is a fatal error in those
>> languages.

>Examples?  I know you're not talking about C or C++. 

Visual Basic, for one, or any other BASIC in history. It looks like a
compiled vs. interpreted thing. C doesn't do any runtime error checking,
because of speed reasons. There's no array bounds checking. You can use
a null pointer when copying a string, which results in an untrappable
program error ;-). Virtually all interpeted languages, where safety
reigns over speed, do all of those. Anything out of the ordinary is a
fatal error.

AppleScript is an extreme example. There, if you're trying to get a list
all picture boxes of a certain type on a page, it works properly if
there is one or more. But if there is isn't one, you don't just get the
empty list. No: it's a fatal (but trappable) error. That kind of anal
behaviour in a language is extremely annoying.

-- 
        Bart.