From: Ken Bloom <kbloom@...>
Date: 2009-03-03T00:38:55+09:00
Subject: Re: Rub 1.9: "inline rescue" doesn't work?

On Mon, 02 Mar 2009 09:36:10 -0500, Gregory Brown wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 3:18 AM, Michal Suchanek <hramrach@centrum.cz>
> wrote:
>> 2009/3/2 Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@gmail.com>:
> 
>>> But please, don't use this technique.  It creates huge debugging
>>> nightmares.
>>>
>>> Instead, just do:
>>>
>>> aaa = obj.respond_to?(:capitalize) ? obj.capitalize : 444
>>>
>>>
>> I'd see it as a Ruby's failure that the proper check is against DRY.
> 
> Agreed, but the costs of the elegance of using rescue as a conditional
> modifier stack up fast in any moderately complex system.
> 
> -greg


The problem with the rescue modifier is that it lumps all types of errors 
into one relatively blunt tool. A rescue(Type) modifier would really 
help, and a ?. operator (like Groovy's) would resolve one of the most 
common cases for a rescue modifier.

--Ken

-- 
Chanoch (Ken) Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/