exception handling in complex Python programs

[Maric Michaud]

Le Thursday 21 August 2008 09:34:47 Bruno Desthuilliers, vous avez écrit :
> > The point
> > is that EAFP conflicts with the interest of reporting errors as soon
> > as possible (on which much has been written see, for instance Ch. 8 -
> > Defensive Programming in Code Complete),
>
> Defensive programming makes sense in the context of a low-level language
>    like C where errors can lead to dramatic results. In high-level
> languages like Python, the worse thing that an unhandled exception can
> cause is an abrupt termination of the process and a nice traceback on
> screen.

... and leave your datas in inconsistent state. So, what C or any other 
language could do worse to your application ?

> In this context, defensive programming is mostly a waste of time 
> - if you can't *correctly* handle the exception where it happens, then
> doing nothing is the better solution.

If I don't buy the argument I actually agree with the conclusion. Each 
component of a program should try to manage only errors tied to their own 
logic and let pass others up to the gui logic for rendering errors the good 
way, persistence logic to rollback unwanted changes, and application logic to 
continue execution the right way. This is hard to do in C because you have no 
way to trap an error which happen randomly in the program, ie. a segfault 
will interrupt the execution anyway.

-- 
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Maric Michaud