Perl is worse!

[Steve Lamb]

On Sun, 30 Jul 2000 01:55:43 +0200, Alex Martelli <alex at magenta.com> wrote:
>Which is what most computer work is doing, though the DB's may
>not be relational ones.  Files, mailboxes, documents, saved
>games, newsgroups, sites -- call them as you wish, they do
>persist (hopefully:-) and your data are right there.

    I am aware of that.  So a problem in IO routine that don't interact with
those, with display routines, mouse input for positioning alone, etc should
all crap out just to protect the data?  That seems utterly foolish.  Sounds
like the reason that Microsoft software crashes so much. Oh no, the mouse
moved the wrong way, CRASH!!!!

>that a program crash makes you lose them, you'll also lose them if
>electricity goes away, or the *OS* crashes (far from unknown, in
>Microsoft widespread OS's especially), etc.

    All of which are a lot less likely than a snafu in some data stream.

>Losing a serious database, such as a full mail archive, is utter tragedy --
>the kind of thing that can break a small company (if they haven't been
>religiously careful about backing up *everything* frequently -- and far too
>many aren't).

    BTW, you are aware that it is possible that such crash outs on minor
things are just as apt to currupt the persistant database as anything else?

>wilfully wrong-headed programmer can always deliberately choose
>to catch and explicitly ignore them, but that requires a higher
>order of perversity than the common mistake of failing to check
>for each and every possible error!-)

    Right, and the highest of them all is having 2/3rds the lines in code
consist of "try:" and another 2/5s be "except:".

>Control-C (depending on the operating system) will cause a specific
>exception, and the programmer decides how it gets handled.

    Then that tosses out your idea of putting it all in a large try:/Except:
block, doesn't it?  We cannot see all errors that will occur.

>No!  The semantics of 'restartable exceptions', which you refer to,

    Ungh!  Great, so even with a global try/except block to catch errors we
end up with a highly unstable system in an unworkable state!

-- 
         Steve C. Lamb         | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
         ICQ: 5107343          | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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