Re: Use of "die" in OO modules

[brian_d_foy]

People have their various opinions about this, and I'm generally against dying in a module only because most of Perl doesn't do that. I want to be consistent in my error handling rather than introducing a new way with every module I use.

The modules I find that annoy me, however, are the ones that die for the wrong reasons. Sometimes I don't care if the call failed, but it shouldn't stop my program if it does. That's a lot different than not being able to connect to a database or open a necessary file, where I probably do want to think about what's going on and how to recover from it.

So, that's not really an answer. If you are going to do that sort of thing, though, use Carp's croak instead. That way the filename and line number in the error message come from the place it was called insted of inside the module, which isn't very helpful.

I have a chapter on "Detecting and Reporting Errors" for Mastering Perl. Despite my personal bias I try to present both sides fairly. :)