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

[BartC]

On 21/03/2016 02:02, Mark Lawrence wrote:
> 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.
>

This code was adapted from a program that used:

    readstrfile(filename)

which either returned the contents of the file as a string, or 0.

That's all. My Python version was thrown together as I don't know if 
there's a similar function to do the same.

If you want to talk about Pythonic, I don't see why that file API 
doesn't count (the original is buried in a library).

Or does Pythonic mean bristling with exceptions and classes and what-not?


-- 
Bartc