Comparison with False - something I don't understand

[Tim Harig]

On 2010-12-02, Harishankar <v.harishankar at gmail.com> wrote:
> I understand that the error vs exception debate is quite a big one in the 
> programming community as a whole and I don't consider myself very 

Actually, I thought that debate was resolved years ago.  I cannot think of
a single recently developed programming language that does not provide
exception handling mechanisms because they have been proven more reliable.

> Python. I do understand both sides of the issue. Exceptions seem to be 
> generally more reliable but I feel they add a lot of complexity 
> particular when a lot of code is placed in a try block. 

Lines of code is one measure of complexity.  Each line of code has a small
chance of containing a bug.  The more lines of code that you have, then the
more likely that one of them contains a bug.  Exceptions, by placing error
handling code in fewer places, requires much fewer lines of code then
requiring error handling code after each call that might produce an error
condition.

The operations of propogating an error up to the higher level logic of
the program is another measure.  In languages without exception handling,
careful planning is needed to pass error conditions up through the call
stack until they reach a high enough level in the logic that decisions
can be made about how to handle them.  Even further planning must be
taken so that when the error condition reaches level where it needs to
be handled, that enough information about the error is present to know
exactly what went wrong so that it can figure out what to do about it.
This usually involves using globals like errorno to pass out of band
information about the error.  Sometimes you even need to know about how
the error affect intermediate levels, did the intermediate code attempt
to handle the condtion and fail?  The Openssl error handling system,
that creates an error logging chain is an example of just how complex
this can become.  You gain all of this functionality automatically
through exception mechanisms; without all of the complexity.