Oliver Steele

Hi, David! Good to hear from you again.

the_dormant: Okay, that does it. I'll finally at scala.

Alan, Thomas, thanks for the comments. Something that makes me uncomfortable about catching exceptions is that it has dynamic scope. If the accessors don't run any code, it's the same thing, but if product.offering is a getter that includes the expression record.connection, then the rescue will hide the case where record is null, as well as the case where product is null.

Alan: After I wrote this I found this post http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/04/writing-programs-for-people-to-read.... on Raganwald, which covered the "narrative mismatch" earlier and better. Braithwaite summarizes a post by Norbert Winklareth as being about "minimizing the semantic distance between the program as written and the solution to the problem as conceived by the programmer".