Re: Python or Perl for a Debian maintainance project?

[Matthias Urlichs <smurf@smurf.noris.de>]

Hi, Andrew Suffield wrote:

>> therefore it's not all that well tested, and lots of little niggly
>> difficult-to-reproduce bugs (reference counting, error reporting, et
>> al.), still lurk in the corners when you do any kind of non-local exit.
> 
> That's frequently unrelated (exit would have the same problems). There are
> some subtle issues with global destruction still in 5.8.
> 
Frankly I don't care THAT much about destructors running on exit.

I do care about cleanup code, both in the exception and non- case.
Perl's Error::Simple's "try FOO finally BAR" construct doesn't execute
BAR if FOO simply calls exit(), or is interrupted by ^C, or leaves by
way of a non-local GOTO (which fortunately ;-) doesn't exist in Python,
so that point isn't entirely fair).

Python's "exit", OTOH, is just another exception, thus catchable. 

All of this doesn't change the fact that Perl code actually has to test
for errors _all_the_time_ if it wants to be reliable -- it's very easy
to overlook exactly the one call which will later bite you.  :-/

>> And yes, I have Perl bugs open about that.
> 
> Can't see any.

Hmmm ...looking... strange, I did send off a few bug emails last year.

Thanks -- I'll have to check what happened to them.

-- 
Matthias Urlichs