On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 1:10 PM, Brion Vibber <brion(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
A runtime error still gives you more useful
information while developing
and debugging than silently passing through a string which, at some
unspecified future time, doesn't do what you expected.
Which is why the alternative we were discussing was having the
functions validate their own input and raise a warning or error if
passed bad input. That also provides runtime failure, which would be
at least as descriptive. More descriptive if we threw an exception,
since it would give a stack trace -- although less descriptive if it
just raised a warning, unless the warning said what line of code the
caller was on. Is it possible to figure out the caller without
parsing debug_backtrace() or something similarly horrible?