Re: RFC 39 (v3) Perl should have a print operator

[Ask Bjoern Hansen]

On 8 Sep 2000, Chaim Frenkel wrote:

> >> Oh, why not? Does anybody actually *ever* check the return value of
> >> print? I think it's not as if we'd break a lot of code.
> 
> ABH> uh, what? you don't do much socket programming now, do you? sockets
> ABH> breaks all the time. Disks runs out of space while you write to
> ABH> files. and so on and so on.
> 
> Could someone enlighten this poor soul and tell me what I _can_ do
> with an error return from a print or close?

rollback transactions to the database, flag the thing you tried to
do as something that should be retried, close and reopen the socket
connection and try again, send a mail to the NOC that the world is
on fire, etcetera, etcetera ...

Tim always refers to
http://search.cpan.org/doc/TIMB/DBI_Talk4_2000/sld024.htm
 
> Reporting it may be useless (disk full).

eh? I like to get someone aware of it so the problem can be fixed. I
also like my application to stop doing whatever it tried to do and
if possibly know what it didn't do so it can try it again later.
 

 - ask 

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Re: RFC 39 (v3) Perl should have a print operator

[Ask Bjoern Hansen]

On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, Bart Lateur wrote:

> >Those are not the semantics of print.   It returns true (1) if successful, and
> >false (undef) otherwise.  You cannot change that.  If I write print "0", it
> >bloody well shan't be returning false.
> 
> Oh, why not? Does anybody actually *ever* check the return value of
> print? I think it's not as if we'd break a lot of code.

uh, what? you don't do much socket programming now, do you? sockets
breaks all the time. Disks runs out of space while you write to
files. and so on and so on.

> Problem is: if you need defined() to see if the print was succesful, you
> cannot return what was printed as well. It's one thing or the other. So
> you cannot have it both ways.

I really don't understand why you want to have what's printed. If
you need it in a variable, you can just make the variable first and
then print.


 - ask

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