die and croak

[Corwinsw]

Hi guys,
Today another question torments my brain.
Damian Conway says in his book "Perl best practices" that is better to use croak instead of die. I also have seen that in other places, as hacking around.
So what is the practical difference between die and croak?

Corwin

 

[fishiface]

use die in your scripts and croak in your modules. You need to have "use Carp;" before you can croak.

The difference is to do with from where the error appears to come. You would not normally want an error message from a module to quote the module name and line number, rather the calling script's name and line number.

I leave it out while developing and, once I'm happyy that the module is stable and debugged, I turn it on, expecting all further errors to be usage errors from the caller.

Yours,

fish

["]As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.["]
--Maur