[erlang-questions] Old school exceptions vs. new age one

[Jachym Holecek]

On Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:27:27 +0200, Maxim Treskin <zerthurd@REDACTED>  
wrote:
> Can you say me, why is new-style better than old?

The 'try ... [of ...] catch ... end' construct is more general and makes it
clear whether or not an exception occured. With just 'catch' consider:

   case catch foo() of
     {'EXIT', Reason} ->
       %% Exception occured.
       ...;
     Result ->
       %% All is fine.
       ...
   end.

Now if 'foo()' evaluates to {'EXIT', whatever} without throwing an  
exception,
our 'case' will still take the error-treatment branch which is not quite
what we wanted...

HTH,
         -- Jachym