Obsessed with Oracle PL/SQL

I got an interesting email today from a reader of one of my PL/SQL 101" articles for Oracle Magazine, Building with Blocks . Q. had taken the code from the article, made some changes, tried to run them, and got very confused. He wrote: When I run this code, I see "Hello World". DECLARE l_message VARCHAR2(100) := 'Hello World!'; BEGIN DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (l_message); EXCEPTION WHEN OTHERS THEN DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line ('Error='||SQLERRM); END; / Hello World! When I change the block to make the l_message variable too small for its string, I see the VALUE_ERROR error message. DECLARE l_message VARCHAR2(10); BEGIN l_message := 'Hello World!'; DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (l_message); EXCEPTION WHEN OTHERS THEN DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line ('Error='||SQLERRM); END; / Error=ORA-06502: PL/SQL: numeric or value error: character string buffer too small But when I change the name of the variables inside the call to DBMS_OUTPUT.PU...