The Cost of Dynamism (was Re: Pyhon 2.x or 3.x, which is faster?)

[Mark Lawrence]

On 21/03/2016 01:35, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 12:28 PM, Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> I got to line 22, saw the bare except, and promptly gave up.
>
> Oh, keep going, Mark. It gets better.
>
> def readstrfile(file):
>      try:
>          data=open(file,"r").read()
>      except:
>          return 0
>      return data
>
> def start():
>      psource=readstrfile(infile)
>      if psource==0:
>          print ("Can't open file",infile)
>          exit(0)
>
> So, if any exception happens during the reading of the file, it gets
> squashed, and 0 is returned - which results in a generic message being
> printed, and the program terminating, with return value 0. Awesome!
>
> ChrisA
>

The essential question is "which is faster?".  Who cares about trivial 
little details like the user being given false data, as (say) they can 
open the file but can't read it.  Or inadvertantly writing an infinite 
loop and not being able to CTRL-C out of it, having to revert to your OS 
to kill the rogue that's killing your CPU.

25 years of trying to teach people how to write Pythonic code and this 
is how far we've got.  Heck, I think I'll see my GP later today for some 
more, more powerful, tranquilisers.

-- 
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence