Help a C++ coder see the light

[holger krekel]

Ville Vainio wrote:
> mark.charsley at REMOVE_THIS.radioscape.com (Mark Charsley) wrote in message news:<memo.20030130181135.820C at a.radioscape.com>...
> 
> > As far as I can tell, the only way to have the same confidence in ones 
> > code as you'd get with C++ (albeit using code that might take you a lot 
> 
> You have confidence in the code you write in C++? Now that's what I
> call misplaced optimism...
> 
> Seriously though, even though the error you mention might require
> extra testing, at least the errors can be fixed immediately when they
> occur. When my C++ program crashes (in production environment w/o 
> debugging tools), I get annoyed because I know I have to try to
> replicate the error and tighten the logging to pin down the location.
> When a Python program crashes (which it does, instead of happily
> continuing after writing garbage to adjacent memory buffer), I'm happy
> because I have found and immediately squashed yet another bug. There
> is no need for heavy debugging machinery, someone just sends you a
> traceback via email or whatever.

Note, though, that with complex python programs you can get tracebacks
that carry not much more information than a segmentation fault. 
E.g. Zope sometimes presents tracebacks that are not easy to 
interprete unless you know the internals pretty well. 

Of course, Python makes it easier to present errors gracefully
and i agree with your other points.

    holger