Re: Nested evals - are they evil?

[radiantmatrix]

This isn't what I'd call "nesting", and yes it is a little redundant. But, it's also harmless.

I'd guess that someone developed callMethod and did some cargo-cult error handling. There's not much point in catching an exception only to throw it again, but perhaps the coder planned on adding some additional handling code.

I'd further guess that later on, some developer (maybe the same one, maybe not) called callMethod, knowing only that it threw an error, and so caught it, and made the same cargo-cult mistake.

If all those various catching blocks (the if ($@) bits) are only re-throwing the error, then they are kind of pointless and redundant. They could probably be removed.

On the other hand, catching an exception and doing something useful about it (writing additional detail to the logs, asking the user what to do, retrying, etc.) is a good pattern, esp. for user-interactive programs. Always do the least surprising thing -- that is, whatever will least surprise your user.