Re: Try-catch and try-finally

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 1:39 PM, Alysson Cunha <alyssonrpg@gmail.com> wrote:
> In a simple example of file transfer over the internet, unexpected things
> can occur in the middle of the process and it is a good pratice ensure that
> the "file handle" will be closed at the end no matter what. In these case, a
> try-finally statement would be very useful.

Ah, but we use pcall for that - try/except in Lua would be sugar for that idiom.

Sugar is fine when it does not have any runtime costs (e.g. a:f(b) is
short for a.f(a,b)) but in this case a closure would be silently
constructed.

I tend to side with Jonne here - exceptions are overused. It's easy to
check if a file exists, why throw an exception to be handled dozens of
stack frames down? (--> Java <---)