Re: [TCLCORE] Tcl-Core Digest, Vol 30, Issue 10

[<lm...@bi...>]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 11:24:26AM -0800, Joe English wrote:
> 
> Neil Madden wrote:
> > Donal K. Fellows wrote:
> > > Neil Madden wrote:
> > >> I'd leave out entirely the glob-matching on errorCode, and let
> > >> people do
> > >> this with [switch] if they want it:
> > > No. That's advocating a lack of vision. If we make it *easy* to trap
> > > specific errors by errcode, people will do so. People don't now
> > > because
> > > it is too hard.
> >
> > I just don't see any evidence for this statement (the use-cases will
> > follow if we just implement this!).
> 
> There has been a longstanding desire that people [*] make
> better use of -errorcode, but there's a vicious cycle:
> nobody bothers to use meaningful -errorcodes because nobody
> bothers to check -errorcode because there's no convenient
> way to do so.

Yeah, heaven forbid that there be a concept of NULL in tcl that could be
trivially used to indicate EOF/ERROR/whatever.  Much better to introduce
language constructs (that will probably get used about as much as -errorcode).
-- 
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Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com