Re: RE: Announcing RFC 'Anonymous Catches'
On 26 juni 2013 at 08:35:59, Michael Wallner ([email protected]) wrote:
On 25 June 2013 22:23, Johannes Schlüter <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-06-25 at 13:19 -0700, Stas Malyshev wrote:
>> Hi!
>>
>> > If I'm to understand this RFC correctly, it is nothing more than a
>> > random suggestion someone posed in the form of a tweet and the author is
>> > saying why not add it since it's not hard to implement. So in summation
>>
>> Well, here we go - this is why not add it, because it makes working with
>> such code harder without actually benefiting anybody.
>
> +1
>
> Right now I set a breakpoint in my editor and look at an exception even
> if it is not used, in future I'd have to change the code for that.
Hrm, this is a very good point!
>> > So this entire discussion can be summed up nicely with "Let's make the
>> > variable optional because... why not?".
>>
>> "Why not" is usually not a very good principle of language design, IMO.
Nothing more to add.
--
Regards,
Mike
This is a little pathetic. Someone sums it up to "Why not", which is not the case, we have
grounded arguments for this, and then all agree that "Why not" is not a reason to add
something. Surely it isn't.
You mention bad coding practices. Sure, we should avoid them. Unused variables is a bad coding
practice. So, we should avoid them. Luckily, it's easy to avoid them with catch-statements,
because we can simply make the variable optional.
I recently wrote a CLI tool in C# to import data from Team Foundation Server. During an update, I
try to download every new commits from where I last stopped (so, from commit "latest+1").
That fails with a ChangesetNotFoundException when no such commit exists, fair enough. I cannot test
beforehand whether that exception will be thrown (that would mean I needed two calls to the server,
now it's in one round) so it's totally expected. I'm doing this for 100.000 files and
I don't want to do anything with the exception, it's nothing more than an indication that
we're already up-to-date for that file. Done. In PHP I would have an unused variable, which
trips up my static analysis tool that keeps warning me about the bad coding practice of having an
unused variable. I agree, it's bad to have that variable defined but PHP won't let me get
rid of it. Another reason for people to bitch about PHP.
Luckily, we can do something about it, and it happens to be easy.
Thread (18 messages)