ANN: PEP 9001 - Asteroid Impact Resistance

[Greg Ewing]

"Steven D. Majewski" wrote:
> 
> Anyone volunteer to write up a PEP ?

PEP 9001: Asteroid Impact Resistance

MOTIVATION

Collision of the Earth with a sizeable celestial
object could have undesirable consequences for any
running Python programs. Although no such occurrence
has been reported to date, examination of the code
suggests that a likely result would be to cause
all running Python interpreters on the same planet
as the one experiencing the event to crash. It is
considered desirable to take proactive steps to
address this problem, rather than waiting for
a bug report to be filed.

PROPOSAL

In any module containing the declaration

   from __future__ import asteroid_resistance

the occurrence of an asteroid impact will cause
an AsteroidImpactError to be raised. Programs may
then trap this exception and take appropriate
corrective action.

UNRESOLVED ISSUES

Devising a suitable test for this feature would
seem to be problematic, since failure of the test
could have disastrous consequences. If this feature
is implemented, it is recommended that it NOT be
tested until this issue can be resolved.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, University of Canterbury,	  
Christchurch, New Zealand
To get my email address, please visit my web page:	  
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg