On Sun, Aug 13, 2000 at 07:35:06PM -0700, Peter Scott wrote:
> At 03:30 PM 8/13/00 -0500, David L. Nicol wrote:
> >Whose RFC deals with this?
> 63, 70, 80, 88 and 96. There would appear to be a groundswell of interest :-)
Well yes, but they represent three authors with (as best I can tell)
pretty similar views of what needs done. With advance apologies for
the over-simplification, these RFCs very briefly summarize to:
63 - Error handling syntax to be based on fatal.pm, a Java-ish
try/catch (Peter Scott).
70 - Allow full error handling via exception-based errors based on
expansion of and addition to fatal.pm (Bennett Todd)
80 - Builtins should permit try/throw/catch as per Java/fatalpm
style (Peter Scott).
88 - Propopses error handling via mechanisms of try, throw, except,
etc. (Tony Olekshy).
96 - Proposes establishing a base class for exception objects,
which could work with either of the two groups above and
might subsume RFC3 as well (Tony Olekshy)
I'd like to see these throw into a post (possibly including RFC3 (Brust)
as well), and pulled out a single proposal with
o a unified proposal for a general try/throw/catch error handling
mechanism for perl
o a recommended object-based implementation of it
o recommended areas where it should be applied in the perl core
o a mechanism allowing programmers to take over error message
production for the above group of items
and a separate proposal for
o a mechanism allowing programmers to take over error message
production for other types
I'm assuming that not all errors would move to the object or try/catch
sort of arrangement; there are lots of times that return values or
unrecoverable errors are all you really need. For the last, one should
use `eval' if you really need to catch them; but an ability to override
the error message may well be sufficient in most cases. And should the
first proposal fail, the second becomes even more critical.
IMHO trading six RFCs for two will greatly improve the chance of passing.
