[Bioperl-l] Grrrr. Another subtle overloading bug ...

[Hilmar Lapp]

Ewan Birney wrote:
> 
> Now ... I have commited some tests to fix this but then I realised that
> this is probably a bad idea and we need to fix things so that
> 
>   if( $@ ) {
>    #
>   }
> 
> Evaluates to TRUE. SteveC - do you know how to do this. I have spent a
> fruitless half an hour in perl.com trying to find the overloading
> documentation.
> 
> This is a nasty bug and something we have to get right. It also emphasises
> how important it is to test the 0.9 series before we call it 1.0 otherwise
> we will just trigger alot of bugs world-wide...
> 

I essentially agree with Ewan. I'd call it mandatory that $@
evaluates to TRUE upon an exception having been thrown. If this
cannot be achieved, I suggest to rollback to the previous way of
exception throwing.

I'd actually suspect that 99% of bioperl users don't need an
exception object. Remember that one of the main use cases of
bioperl is scripting, not only ensembl-scale applications. If an
exception occurs you just want to bail out with a nice message
that aids debugging. The worst scenario is if the kind of
exception throwing affects the bioperl learning curve in any
(negative) way.


	-hilmar
-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Hilmar Lapp                              email: hilmarl@yahoo.com
San Diego, Ca. 92130                     phone: +1 858 812 1757
-----------------------------------------------------------------

_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com