Peter Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > At 09:36 AM 2/22/2001 +0000, David Grove wrote: > >This is what's scaring me about all this talk about > >exceptions... it can break this mold and make Perl into a "complainer > >language" belching up uncaught (don't care) exceptions forcing try/except > >blocks around every piece of IO or DB handling. The style > > > >try { > > open(FOO, "./foo"); > >} > >catch FileOpenException $e { > > die "Drat:" .$e->Message. "\n"; > >} > > > >is horrifying to me over the normal > > > >open(FOO, "./foo") or die "Drat:$!\n"; > > Now steady on. No-one is proposing getting rid of the normal way of doing > it. We're just talking about beefing up another WTDI. There are > situations > in programs that have dozens or hundreds of lines of code which benefit > from the exception model just as much as your example. Actually, I have heard talk among us about eliminating $! and return values from such functions as open(). This was likely extremicisit view during the RFC's but the image stuck pretty hard. Anyway, the point was that perl as a high level language isn't safe because it's safe but because it makes decent assumptions. Bounds checking, the example given, doesn't exist because there are no bounds... at least not in a comparative sense. It has "no arbitrary limits" even if you impose them yourself (well, in similar matters and with good programming). The benefits of this particular high-level language are often a redefinition of language concepts. Comparing Perl bounds checking with "superior" bounds checking in C++ and (gack) VB is comparing apples with a nectarine... or glued-together quartz flakes with a pearl. p