"False exceptions?" (was Re: theme of the week: tools

[Dan Perl]

Yes, that's what I was talking about.  Thanks, Carlos, for explaining it.  I 
actually should have said false detection of exceptions or wrong detection 
of exceptions.  I don't remember what Wingware are calling it.  Actually, 
the way they were qualifying it was something like "if you do not see this 
exception when running the script outside the IDE, then you should probably 
flag it to be ignored".  And they are giving a list of builtin modules where 
those exceptions are usually "falsely" detected.

I didn't try to figure out what their exception detection mechanism is and 
why they have this problem.  I just uninstalled the IDE.  So 10 days for the 
trial was more than enough after all. ;-)  I think I had it installed for 
about 2 days.  I can tolerate a bug and I wouldn't be so riled up, but what 
got me was the marketing spin and how they were just excusing the bug, like 
they would never fix it.

The "false exceptions" and the lack of a class browser made me decide not to 
choose Wing IDE this time.  Their attitude about the "false exceptions" made 
me cut the trial short and never to consider Wing IDE again.

Dan

"Carlos Ribeiro" <carribeiro at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.3947.1096250696.5135.python-list at python.org...
> On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 21:36:18 -0400, Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> 
> wrote:
>> Dan Perl wrote:
>> > I debugged one of my
>> > scripts (that I knew it works) and got an unexplainable exception.  It 
>> > turns
>> > out that Wing IDE falsely detects some exceptions.  They know about it 
>> > and
>> > they suggest that if you KNOW that it's a false exception you should 
>> > flag it
>> > to be ignored.  Yes, Wingware people, I know it's a false exception, 
>> > but
>>
>> What exactly is a "false exception"?  I have never heard of such
>> a thing, and can't imagine what it might be.  Python raises
>> exceptions, they are subclasses of Exception or (old-style)
>> strings, they have tracebacks, they come from a variety of
>> sources, there's lots of things to know about exceptions but
>> "falseness" is not something about which I'm aware...
>
> They're false in the sense that that they're not supposed to be raised
> to the attention of the user. What happens is that Wing IDE is super
> sensitive with regards to exceptions; when an exception is raised in
> some internal module, Wing tries to outsmart the library and warn the
> user that an exception happened. A "false exception" is one that would
> happen and be silently treated by the library itself, without nobody
> noticing, but that's catched by Wing IDE nonetheless, in a totally
> unnecessary and obstrusive way. You can see that it's a case where the
> tool tries to be too smart for its own good.
>
> p.s. Why do they do it? For what I could see, the intention seems to
> be able to catch situations where a valid exception that should be
> raised to the user attention is silented by a generic error handler.
> It really may be useful in some situations, but it isn't a reasonable
> default in my opinion.
>
> -- 
> Carlos Ribeiro
> Consultoria em Projetos
> blog: http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com
> blog: http://pythonnotes.blogspot.com
> mail: carribeiro at gmail.com
> mail: carribeiro at yahoo.com