So I’ve done some complaining and explaining about what I’d like to see in regards to Exceptions in Perl. I Mostly explained what I wanted for catching Exceptions, and a little on throwing Exception objects, but not really how those objects should behave. I’ve looked at and tried various exception modules, including croak, confess, and Throwable. I basically spent time one day reading the manuals of most of the exception objects on CPAN. Most of them didn’t allow me to easily for the exceptions I needed (meaning they required more work than I thought I should do for one or two exceptions ). Among these modules I found Exception::Base which appears to do everything I need (though I still wish for something like it in core, with shinier syntax). Of course wee need to be able to throw simple Exceptions, preferably ones that can stringify, and are easily matched in a switch or if statement. Exception::Base can do all of that, and it even boolifies to true.

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use 5.014;
use warnings;

use Try::Tiny;
use Exception::Base;

try {
    if ( 0 ) {
        Exception::Base->throw( message => 'this sucks', value => 0 );
    }

    if ( 1 ) {
        Exception::Base->throw( message => 'this really sucks', value => 1 );
    }
}
catch {
    given ( $_ ) {
        when ( $_ == 0 ) {
            say $_;
        }
        when ( $_ == 1 ) {
            say $_;
        }
    }
}

A really big thing I wanted was a class I could easily add attributes to without writing a whole new package/pm and subclassing it there. I wanted this because I really wanted to be able to have 2 kinds of messages, one for programmers, and one for users, but truthfully I only had one class where I needed this flexibility (at the time). It is also occasionally useful to have attributes that describe something, e.g. would be really useful in moose attribute exceptions, to be able to have an object where you could catch the exception and get the attribute name without parsing. Fortunately Exception::Base can do this too.

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use 5.014;
use warnings;

use Try::Tiny;
use Exception::Base (
    'My::Exception' => {
        has => [ qw( usermsg logmsg attr ) ],
        string_attributes => [ qw( usermsg logmsg ) ],
    },
);

try {
        My::Exception->throw(
            value => 1,
            attr    => 'bad',
            logmsg  => 'really obscure and technical',
            usermsg => 'this message is useless'
        );
}
catch {
    warn $_;
    say $_->usermsg;    

    say 'this is really bad' if $_->attr eq 'bad';
}

You’ll notice if you run this script that in the warn, both usermsg and logmsg are printed because they are both string_attributes. You’ll also notice that attr isn’t printed at all, but that we can look at it directly to make other decisions. Exception::Base has other features such as setting the verbosity so you can go from a croak level message to a full stacktrace. It also allows you to ignore_packages so that the exception does not appear to be thrown from that package. This is similar to @CARP_NOT.