Re: RFC: Modify open() and opendir() to return handles

[Tim Jenness]

On Thu, 3 Aug 2000, Graham Barr wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 03, 2000 at 09:01:44AM -0600, Tom Christiansen wrote:
> > >On Thu, Aug 03, 2000 at 08:13:09AM -0600, Tom Christiansen wrote:
> > >> No, that's gross.  A failed constructor should return undef.  See my 
> > >> later message.
> > 
> > >That has always been my view. But then people say "but why did it fail"
> > >and having global variables does not scale well.
> > 
> > Syscalls should use errno.  Others may vary.
> 
> It's the other may vary that bothers me. Even the core modules
> can't agree, but that is a discussion for the stdlib list.
> 

Isn't there some way to make $! usable when returning from normal subs as
well as from syscalls? It seems that $! goes a long way to providing the
an error message/error number and just needs a bit of a push to extend it
to be more generic.

-- 
Tim Jenness
JCMT software engineer/Support scientist
http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/~timj