How robust is Python ?

[Thomas Wouters]

On Fri, Jan 12, 2001 at 11:06:00AM -0500, Steve Holden wrote:

[ About 'continue' not working inside 'try' ]

> The documentation states that the continue syntax error is due to
> "laziness" on the part of the implementors, though they seem to keep
> pretty busy to me.

It's just laziness in scheduling. Each of the 'implementors' (actually
part-time hackers + some random guys who get paid for it) has to decide at
one point or another what particulare feature or bug (or tuning, as the
recent readline() discussion on python-dev have shown) they are going to
tackle now. It's just more fun to think up something new, and glow in
admiration of how *easy* it is to implement the random new feature (been
there, done that) than it is to dig into something as archaic as the
continue-inside-try problem -- I bet most python-dev'ers don't even know why
that limitation is there, and don't bother to figure it out because it's not
something that comes up often and is easy to work around. :)

But then, they do other valuable stuff, like thinking up good ways to do
weak references, nested scopes and performance improvements. Make no
mistake, I envy their laziness (and free time ;)

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net>

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