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"False exceptions?" (was Re: theme of the week: tools

Carlos Ribeiro carribeiro at gmail.com
Sun Sep 26 22:04:49 EDT 2004 
On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 21:36:18 -0400, Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:
> Dan Perl wrote:
> > I debugged one of my
> > scripts (that I knew it works) and got an unexplainable exception.  It turns
> > out that Wing IDE falsely detects some exceptions.  They know about it and
> > they suggest that if you KNOW that it's a false exception you should flag it
> > to be ignored.  Yes, Wingware people, I know it's a false exception, but
> 
> What exactly is a "false exception"?  I have never heard of such
> a thing, and can't imagine what it might be.  Python raises
> exceptions, they are subclasses of Exception or (old-style)
> strings, they have tracebacks, they come from a variety of
> sources, there's lots of things to know about exceptions but
> "falseness" is not something about which I'm aware...

They're false in the sense that that they're not supposed to be raised
to the attention of the user. What happens is that Wing IDE is super
sensitive with regards to exceptions; when an exception is raised in
some internal module, Wing tries to outsmart the library and warn the
user that an exception happened. A "false exception" is one that would
happen and be silently treated by the library itself, without nobody
noticing, but that's catched by Wing IDE nonetheless, in a totally
unnecessary and obstrusive way. You can see that it's a case where the
tool tries to be too smart for its own good.

p.s. Why do they do it? For what I could see, the intention seems to
be able to catch situations where a valid exception that should be
raised to the user attention is silented by a generic error handler.
It really may be useful in some situations, but it isn't a reasonable
default in my opinion.

-- 
Carlos Ribeiro
Consultoria em Projetos
blog: http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com
blog: http://pythonnotes.blogspot.com
mail: carribeiro at gmail.com
mail: carribeiro at yahoo.com
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