On 9/12/05, Brian Quinlan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Mark Dufour wrote: > > The latter is certainly my goal. I just haven't looked into supporting > > exceptions yet, because I personally never use them. I feel they > > should only occur in very bad situations, or they become goto-like > > constructs that intuitively feel very ugly. In the 5500 lines of the > > compiler itself, I have not needed to use a single exception. For > > example, I prefer to check whether a file exists myself, rather than > > executing code that can suddenly jump somewhere else. There's probably > > some use for exceptions, but I don't (want to?) see it. > > I don't understand your example here. When you check that a file exists, > you feel safe that openning it will succeed? What if: > > o you don't have permission to open the file > o the file is deleted in the time between you checking for it's > existance and opening it (possible race condition) > o the system doesn't have sufficient resources to open the file > e.g. too many open file handles > o the file is already open with exclusive read/write permission
You're right, I don't feel safe about that. It's a bad example. I just prefer error codes, because the code usually becomes cleaner (at least to me). I would really like it if I could do something like this: f = file(name) if not f: print 'error opening file %s: %s', name, str(f.error) sys.exit() Error codes may be more work in some cases, but I really like the (subjectively) cleaner code. Again, exceptions are probably useful in some programs, but I wouldn't know.. :) thanks! mark. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list