I have been working on the Perl 5 reference implementation of RFC 88 functionality (Try.pm, which is currently available at: http://www.avrasoft.com/perl6/try6-ref5.txt ), and I stumbled across the following result. If you are writing some code, and there is a "throw" subroutine in scope, and there is a package Exception in scope and it has a "throw" subroutine, then Perl 5 can tell the following apart (search for the /!throw-3/ regression test in try6-ref5.txt): throw "A Message"; # Calls the subroutine. throw Exception; # Calls the method. throw "A Foo Message", tag => "ABC.1234"; throw Exception "Foo", tag => "ABC.1234"; I don't know about you, but I think this is cool. Talk about DWIM! Good old Perl. So now, in Try.pm, If you throw a string, you get an Exception anyway: throw "A Message", ...; is now the same as: throw Exception "A Message", ...; You can't say C<throw $@> to re-raise an exception any more, but you can say $@->throw or use a simple bare C<throw;>! And C<throw;> with @@ == 0 raises a simple Exception! I'll modify RFC 88 to change the throw syntax from: <throw> := throw <E> <message> <options> ; <E> := <class> | <object> to: <throw> := throw <class> <message> <options> ; | throw <string> <options> ; | throw; and make the appropriate changes to the semantics. And of course, C<try> should accept an additional hook parameter that specifies the class into which to instantiate string throws. Seems obvious in retrospect; we already had <class> and <string>, why did <E> have to be <class> | <object>? Ah well, serendipity is like that, I suppose. Yours, &c, Tony Olekshy
