Programmer's notebook: a taxonomy of error handling

From: Irving Kimura (irving_kimura_at_lycos.com)
Date: 01/30/04 

Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 02:55:29 +0000 (UTC)

(Note to the impatient: The connection with Perl doesn't emerge
until the end of this post.)

I find that nothing complicates and obfuscates my code more than
the problem of dealing with errors: user errors, system errors,
algorithm-design errors...

Just checking for the occurrence of errors and doing something dumb
like aborting the program is bad enough, but trying to make my code
fault-tolerant and/or make it generate reasonably helpful error
messages, turns my code into a horror show. (If on top of this I
add CGI as the context, I begin to contemplate seppuku as the only
way to avoid disgrace.)

The truth of the matter is that I have yet to find a good way to
architect my error handling. Granted, there are many types/levels
of error (as mentioned above) and handling each of these may require
an entirely different architecture. It doesn't matter: I haven't
hit upon a good formula for any of them.

Now I'm at the stage of learning good Perl programming, which
includes reading good Perl source, so I would like to study examples
of Perl modules (from CPAN) with well-designed error-handling
schemes.

Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Irv

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