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Comment by mey | Hacker News Reader

PHP is a bit of hyperbole, but otherwise correct. :) Ruby, Python, Javascript all support exceptions. PHP does support exceptions, but it's core libraries do not use them. Gotta trust PHP to do the worst of both worlds approach. Perl 6 has it but not sure where the world is in the 5 -> 6 migration. I'm not going to count eval(...) as exception handling as a language feature in Perl 5. :)

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I'm not going to count eval(...) as exception handling as a language feature in Perl 5. :)

You should. It's a perfectly valid exception handling mechanism. It's unfortunate that the name "eval" is overloaded for two separate behaviors:

  * catch exceptions thrown as strings or objects

  * compile and execute code from a string

Other than the name, they're different behaviors.

I am not a Perl expert. Only worked on some simple install tools written it a couple years ago. Re-reading docs, eval(...) traps exceptions (die), but requires manual inspection of error state, instead of automatically halting. It operates more like Go/C/PHP in that regard.

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