This seems like a kind of hack-y laziness, specifically in the form of a poor man's exception. It's no more "magic" than an if statement or any other kind of b

This seems like a kind of hack-y laziness, specifically in the form of a poor man's exception. It's no more "magic" than an if statement or any other kind of block. I would probably use this plenty if I were to use Ruby (Haskell has spoiled me for strict evaluation forever), but it definitely smells like language bloat -- you wouldn't need to tell me it's Perl-inspired for me to strongly suspect it.