RE: RFC 359 (v1) Improvement needed in error messages (both internal errors and die function).

On Sunday, October 01, 2000 1:37 AM, Perl6 RFC Librarian 
[SMTP:[email protected]] wrote:
> This and other RFCs are available on the web at
>   http://dev.perl.org/rfc/
>
> =head1 TITLE
>
> Improvement needed in error messages (both internal errors and die function).

Feel free to put anything you like between the " and the ". It's up to the 
programmer to provide meaningful error messages, not the language itself. As 
for the error messages themselves that get placed into $! and its kin, I will 
say as a person who is forced to use M$ Access and M$ VB for a to make a living 
(temporarily), that these errors by themselves (the internal error messages 
within perl itself) are extremely informative. The M$ products give almost no 
helpful error message at any time, making debugging nearly impossible, and 
compared to Delphi and many C++ compilers, tends to correctly identify the root 
of the problem rather than sending you on a wild goose chase when you leave out 
a semicolon.

Feel free to use statements like

  open(F, ">$file") || die "FILE ERROR: $!\n";

if you like, but leave the mechanism simple. Otherwise you interfere with 
people who DO use this type of structure to identify to the user the source of 
the error (internal or external, i.e., my fault or their own stupid fault), or 
whether it's an ERROR: or a WARNING: or if I'm going to ABORT:.