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in reply to Re^5: Perl Best Practices
in thread Perl Best Practices

In my experience, why an exception was thrown is rarely as important as that it was thrown.

I.e. the calling code is almost never interested in why something didn't work out, it only needs to log that it couldn't complete it's own task, and the reason for it (so that you can see afterwards what went wrong). There is very seldom any active attempt to actually recover from the error in a very specific way, apart from perhaps waiting, doing it again etc.

Disambiguating different reasons for the error and adjusting to that is better handled at a lower level of the code, closer to where the error occurred, and there you already have the proper granularity, i.e. that an exception occurred.

/J

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Re^7: Perl Best Practices
by wazoox (Prior) on Jul 19, 2005 at 17:29 UTC
    In my experience, why an exception was thrown is rarely as important as that it was thrown.

    That's absolutely right. However, if a particular exception is caught from a function you didn't anticipated, you may very well end with an incoherent state. Well, There's a nice article on this matter here : Exceptions and another one there which is even better :Cleaner, more elegant, and harder to recognize . I understand very well the way exceptions match the "laziness and hubris" state-of-mind, however I feel more like Joel on this ;)

      Am I the only one who thinks the linked articles make a better case against mutable state than exceptions?
        What do you mean? For me "mutable states" are stuff like loop indices. May you develop?