pear, generic error class?

Hi! Just wondering if pear might include a generic error class that would be used with the classes that are included in pear? Instead of each class having it's own unique way of dealing with errors. I made an error class a while ago that has worked well for me so far, although it needs rewriting now that I know better what I want. Here's a little blurb I starting writing about it: class Error { } A generic error class to be used by a class. It knows about three types of errors, a message, warning, and error. A message would be something like 'Your query returned no data', a warning might be 'the email address you entered doesn't contain an @ symbol', and an error is bad, example, mysql_connect() fails, or mysql_query fails (maybe the sysadmin suddenly decided to turn off magic_quotes). I decided on the msg,warn,error types so I could do something useful with them, such as emailing me error messages, and logging warnings to a file (if many people make the same error when filling out a form, I should add a note on the form or something). The msg, warn,and error functions all return false, and are meant to be used like: include "error.php"; class Test { var $this->error; // instance of class Error function Test() { $this->error = new Error; } function get_file($myfile) { if(!file_exists($myfile)) return $this->error->msg("File '$myfile' doesn't exist"); return file($myfile); } } $test = new Test; if(!$myfile = $test->get_file("/my/file.txt")) echo "Oops! ".$test->error->str; else echo $myfile[0]; Any reason why I can't do: file_exists($myfile) or return($this->error->msg("File '$myfile' doesn't exist")); that gives me an error??? it would be _much_ cleaner though... Tom