Bug #21612 for Error: Inconsistent behaviour in rethrow

Error version: Error-0.17004 Perl version: v5.8.6 OS version: OpenBSD 3.9 / i386 (but confirmed on other versions/OSes, such as 5.8.8/Linux/amd64). Most OO languages allow for "exception translation" - that is, catching an exception, encapsulating the information in an other class and re-throwing it. Error.pm supports that... but not always! Generally speaking, using "plain" calls to die is equivalent to throwing an Error::Simple. Yet, when doing this: try { die "oops" } otherwise { die "oops2" }; we get: at /usr/local/libdata/perl5/site_perl/Error.pm line 38. instead of the expected: oops2 at -e line 1. that we get when doing try { die "oops" } otherwise { throw Error::Simple "oops2" }; Oops. Exception translation works, but only when rethrowing objects. That's inconsistent... Some research shows that if the error is correctly detected by Error.pm, it's mysteriously lost when it comes to rethrowing it. After some more work, it appears that the following snippet does not do what one might think: eval { local $@; die "oops" }; print "no error\n" unless $@; This was probably unforeseen at the time of writing of version 0.17003, which introduced this bug with the intend of making the exception available in $@ in catch/otherwise clauses. Of course the alteration of this variable was to be as local as possible and resulted in a local declaration in the eval block. But since actually we still want to have the modified version of $@ past the eval, the fix is simply to move the local declaration out of this scope. It will not affect the program logic, as the success of the eval is determined using its return value ($ok), not $@. Attached is a patch for the catch and otherwise code, with a testcase that illustrates the problem. Best regards, -Thomas Equeter.