[Python-Dev] Add more SyntaxWarnings?

[Chris Barker - NOAA Federal]

> But as a rule,
>> there are a LOT of errors that can be pretty mysterious to newbies.
>
> Isn't that the very definition of "newbie"?  That's half a joke, but I
> really don't think that programmers new to Python should be the
> standard.

Python is broadly advocated (and used) as a first language to learn.
Because it is.

So I think anything we can do to help newbies, *that doesn’t make the
language less powerful, or even more annoying for experienced
developers* is a good thing.

That is: prioritizing newbie-friendliness is good. Prioritizing it
over other important things is not.

-CHB



> The problematic cases are those where even a relatively
> experienced Python programmer needs to be told why an error is raised,
> because it's too hard to figure out from background knowledge of the
> language, you need to know about implementation internals.
>
>> I would love to see Python become generally more informative with
>> errors.
>
> I would love to see all automated systems become more informative with
> errors!  One thing I like about Python the development community is
> that people are doing something about it.  Slowly but surely ....
>
>> I don’t think so — what we need are helpful error messages. If it
>> will be raised at compile time, then it won’t generally be
>> catchable in s try-except— so the actual exception type isn’t very
>> important.
>
> +1
>
> In general depending much on exception type is a hit-or-miss affair.