Actually, "carp", used as a verb, meaning complain, has been in use since the 1500s, so is long past the slang stage.

However, "croak" is still considered a slang term.

But still I'm confused about the need to have several names for things which are almost similar - i.e. different only in orthogonal dimensions - instead of parametrizing them.

Thanks anyway! =)

I agree that PHPisms like 500 extra, semi-overlapping keywords can be a bad thing but I've always liked Carp's interface. Taking the generalized and parameterized route to extremes is warn and die becoming replaced with error($level, $message) or something. I use Carp's functions enough, including longmess and shortmess for logs, that I much prefer having specific functions for acking around and such.

I'm fine with Huffman* coding keywords (often used = own keyword) and naming functions is indeed difficult ...

But I'm still not happy, sorry ! :)

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

update

PS: any need to explain MilliHuffman? ;-)

I can only guess why Larry & Co. did it this way, and that guess would be that it was to preserve backwards-compatibility with perl 4, which already had the current interface for warn and die.

Did caller exist in perl 4? It kind of makes sense to use a different interface since modules got a lot of changes in 5.0

Did caller exist in perl 4?

According to http://www.rexswain.com/perl4.html, caller existed in Perl 4, and so did die and warn.

Alexander

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)

From the perl.n manpage of perl 4 patchlevel 36:

caller(EXPR)

caller Returns the context of the current subroutine call:

($package,$filename,$line) = caller;

With EXPR, returns some extra information that the debugger uses to print a stack trace. The value of EXPR indicates how many call frames to go back before the current one.

perl -le'print map{pack c,($-++?1:13)+ord}split//,ESEL'