Dan Sugalski wrote: > > David L. Nicol wrote: > > > Why not call them throw and catch, like everywhere else, > > and reccomend them over die? > > "If everyone else was jumping off a bridge, would you jump too?" If they're jumping off because it's on fire at both ends, I might ;-) > What everyone else is doing isn't hugely relevant. What we already > do is far more so, certainly. And, given that perl cribs from > english as much as any other language, spending some time to get > names that fit well makes perfect sense, especially since most of > the perl programmers that start using this won't be coming with > huge gobs of experience from languages that already do it. Hmm, I don't have any hard data on what portion of existing Perl programmers have experience with words like try, throw, and catch. Lisp has had "catch", "throw", and "unwind-protect" for ages, and many other languages have borrowed similar terms over the years. Why not leave "die" alone? That won't cause any experiential discordance, especially if the semantics of "throw" changes slightly! Instead of changing "die", just *add* "throw". It certainly gives us good handles to refer to the old and the new. Then, if much later in the Perl 6 design process, it is decided that there is a good reason to remove "die" and only have "throw", or to replace "die" with the new syntax and semantics of "throw", that can be dealt with then. On the other hand, I agree completely that careful consideration of the words to use for things like try, throw, catch, and finally is a good idea. Does anyone have another consistent set that could work for the purposes envisioned by RFCs 63 and 88 and yet still not create too much discordance by badly overloading existing keywords? Yours, &c, Tony Olekshy
