Recommendations (or best practices) to define functions (or methods)

[vizcayno]

Hello:
Need your help in the "correct" definition of the next function. If
necessary, I would like to know about a web site or documentation that
tells me about best practices in defining functions, especially for
those that consider the error exceptions management.
I have the next alternatives but I think there are better:

Alternative 1:
=============
def ExecuteSQL(cmdSQL, cursor):
    try:
        cursor.execute(cmdSQL)
    except Exception, e:
        return e
    return 1

Seems a good solution but the function is not returning an uniform
type, should the code that receives the function result decides the
error display according of datatype? If I do this in C# I think I will
have problems.


Alternative 2:
=============
def ExecuteSQL(cmdSQL, cursor):
    try:
        cursor.execute(cmdSQL)
    except Exception, e:
        return 0, e   # or return (0,e.message)
    return 1, "ok"    # or return (1, "ok")
Sounds good, but seems forced. When doing return 1, "ok" I am doing
redundancy and I have problems with the type (e is exception type and
"ok" is string).


Alternative 3:
=============
def ExecuteSQL(cmdSQL, cursor):
    try:
        cursor.execute(cmdSQL)
    except Exception, e:
        print "ERROR:", e
        return 0
    return 1

It solves the problem of alternative 1 and 2, but the print keyword
would have problems if the function is called from an WEB or GUI
application and, because there are plans to convert print into a
function in py3k.


Alternative 4:
=============
def ExecuteSQL(cmdSQL, cursor):
    try:
        cursor.execute(cmdSQL)
    except Exception, e:
        print >> logerr, e.message
        return 0
    return 1

Seems a good solution but I should always be persuaded to have an open
global file (logerr) when invoking this function; otherwise code will
generate another error. The function is not totally independent.I think
I would be in the same situation when using the "logging" battery.

Thanks for your attention.

Regards,