Steven D'Aprano writes: > On Fri, 1 Jul 2016 10:25 pm, Christopher Reimer wrote: > >> For my BASIC interpreter, each line of BASIC is broken this way into >> tokens. > [...] >> By using * to unpack the split line, my program no longer crashes and no >> try/except block is needed to work around the crash. A later line of code >> will test the expression, ignore if empty or run regex if full. > > I wish you wouldn't describe this as "crash". > > The Python interpreter should never crash. That would be a segmentation > fault, and that is considered to be a very serious bug. > > But *raising an exception* is another story. Raising exceptions is not a > crash, it is the interpreter working as expected. This statement: > > line_number, keyword, expr = "20 END".split(' ', 2) > > is SUPPOSED to raise an exception, if it didn't, the interpreter would > be broken. To call that a "crash" is horribly misleading.
I think Christopher merely echoed my use of the word, so let me take the blame. But it's quite different to say "my program crashed" (didn't handle an exception - fix program, or fix the input) and "the Python interpreter crashed" (uh oh). -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list