Re: return up two levels?

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

On 03/10/2014 08:33 PM, Kurtis Rader wrote:
> Please don't use that technique unless it's in the context of something
> atypical like a debugger. It's a really bad software pattern. It's spooky
> action at a distance. It's a form of monkey-patching. it practically
> guarantees hard to debug errors. Plus a large number of other problems.
> Don't do it. Be explicit about return values. If you want a caller of
> function2 to exit immediately have function2 return non-zero and test for
> that. For example,
>
> function2() { print I failed to do my job; return 1 }
> function1() { if ! function2; then; print unexpected failure; return 0; fi;
> print life is good }
>
Hmmm, sobering advice. I'm always looking to expand the techniques 
available to me,
and Peter's 'trap' idea does/would streamline my code for this one 
particular problem,
which is just a very short helper function called in almost all of my 
other functions  in
a trivial and routine sort of way where there are unlikely to be any 
strange issues. Still, this
trap thing violates the rule of least surprise and breaks the basic 
rules of code flow, so
I do take your point.  I guess if this sort of thing can be considered 
'standard zsh practice'
then I'm inclined to keep it, but if not, then out it goes.  But all the 
'sh's' have so many
abominable and dirty practices anyway that this trap would hardly stand 
out ;-)