On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 5:11 PM, Emanuele D'Arrigo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm pondering on what is a bit of a philosophical dilemma. > When should I throw an exception and when should I not? > > Suppose I have myFunc1() calling myFunc2() which in turn calls myFunc3 > (). > Suppose myFunc3() has detected a problem. What should it do? > > Throw an exception, forcing myFunc2() to handle it and/or trigger > another exception for myFunc1() to deal with? Or should it simply > return a meaningful error code, for myFunc2() and myFunc1() to handle > as an option but not forcing them to do so?
Depends on how serious the error is (e.g. str.find() returns -1 rather than raising an exception if it can't find the substring), but 98% of the time, you'll want to raise an exception; it's Pythonic, idiomatic, and expected. You'd have to have a *really* good reason to use an error value/code instead. Python is not C, and despite what Joel has said On Software, error codes generally suck. Cheers, Chris -- Follow the path of the Iguana... http://rebertia.com > > Manu > -- > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list > -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
