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dying is good (Score:2)
In general, with my recent modules I've been trying to adopt a consistent behavior of "die on mutation, die on bad params, return false on accessor".
In other words, if you try to mutate/construct an object in an illegal way, it throws an exception. If a method takes parameters and you pass invalid parameters, it dies. If you try to simply retrieve some information that isn't available, it returns false.
This is, IMHO, a pretty sensible way to do things. If you try to do something impossible, it dies. If you pass in bad data, it dies. These are both _exceptional_ conditions, and merit a big reaction. OTOH, if you simply ask for data that can't be provided, I figure it's up to you to check the return value and handle the "no data" case however you see fit.
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