I just had an interesting email exchange with one of my newer staff, a friend from university who worked for [insert name of company] for a number of years. Aforementioned anonymized company being a Fortune 500 company that is in the IT industry. I’ve got stuff with their logo on it in my office.

The conversation began when he asked if he could use a goto statement (in PHP code!) for error handling.

Bearing in mind that this is somebody who is extremely familiar with both Object Oriented and good coding practises, I realized that there must be an interesting story underlying this.

His response to my query for more info is informative:

Tease all you want — I’ll lean on the weight of nine years of experience at [big company name], where (gasp) gotos were ubiquitous (almost exclusively in error handling code, but still).

To clarify further: I actually wasn’t aware that PHP had a goto statement (see: php.net/goto – they have the nice xkcd cartoon in the comments). I’ve been coding in PHP for a long time.

There’s two methods that I usually use to handle errors in PHP code, in case you’re wondering:

1. Make sure that code that can crash is encapsulated in a nice neat function. Check return values of function calls inside the function. If necessary, stick an “@” before function calls that tend to crash in a messy manner. Then return useful info about the final state from the function itself, and check things out higher up in the stack.

2. Stick try/catch code around code that can crash. If necessary, subclass error classes and put in nice handlers for them.

In both cases, make sure that the error level for reporting is appropriate, and that we don’t output actual error messages back to the end user. Where useful, put in logging, and possibly put in code to email error reports back to admin.