Re^2: Catching a 'division by zero' error with Exception::Class

[ggvaidya]

I completely agree, eval-die is flexible enough for most use. Is there any advantage with hierarchical exceptions which is worth the addition code and modules?

The original problem can be written as:

use warnings;
use strict;
use 5.0100;

eval {
        print 10/0; # equivalent to: die "Illegal division by zero";
};

if($@) {
        if($@ =~ /Illegal division by zero/) {
                print "I feel funny\n";
                exit;
        } else {
                die $@;
        }
}

# No exception thrown.
print "What do you know, Perl can divide by zero.\n";

Updated: this code doesn't work properly before Perl 5.10, so I added a 'use' statement to stop it.

[mr_mischief]

I hope it's helpful to someone to point out that your solution works in 5.10.0 but in 5.8.8 perl dies with the familiar "Illegal division by zero at foo line 5." error.

In fact, pasting that into perl 5.8.8's standard input instead of putting it in a file exits the shell in which it was run. That may not be the sort of thing people appreciate from example code.

[ggvaidya]

Thanks for pointing that out! I've put a "use 5.10" line in so it won't run unchanged on pre-5.10 perls. Do you think that's good enough?

[mr_mischief]

It still exits the shell under which perl is running if it's pasted into 5.8.8's standard input.

This version still issues commands to the shell but one of them isn't an exit:

use warnings;
use strict;
use 5.0100;

eval {
        print 10/0; # equivalent to: die "Illegal division by zero";
};

if($@) {
        if($@ =~ /Illegal division by zero/) {
                print "I feel funny\n";
                exit;
        } else {
                die $@;
        }
}

# No exception thrown.
print "What do you know, Perl can divide by zero.\n";

When the code is placed in a file, a proper insufficient version abend happens.

I'm not sure why exactly this is, but it is obviously some sort of issue with use version; not being processed as one might expect when the code source is standard input. I'm not sure in general how important that is to have fixed, since it is kind of a degenerate case. It'd be useful for example snippets, though, if pasting into the standard input stream worked the same way as writing to a file and calling perl with that file as an argument.