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First release of Shed Skin, a Python-to-C++ compiler.

Mark Dufour mark.dufour at gmail.com
Tue Sep 13 06:21:02 EDT 2005 
> You forgot to check for an error when:
> o when you wrote f.error [attribute "error" might not exist e.g. f is
>                            None]
> o you called str(f.error) [might contain unicode characters that can't
>                             be converted to a string using the default
>                             encoding]
> o when you used the % operator [format string might be wrong]
> And, of course, pretty much every expression can result in a memory error.

I don't mind the program bailing out in such a case and telling me
where it went wrong, so I can fix the problem. I just don't really see
the need for catching exceptions yourself. Especially not in
well-tested code, potentially to be compiled.

> Exception handling is a boon because almost EVERY expression that you
> write can result in a error and checking each one is tedious in the
> extreme. So people forget and then their programs exhibit very odd
> behavior that is very difficult to debug.

What do you mean odd behaviour? If they don't catch exceptions, the
program will bail out, showing what went wrong, yeah?

> If you look at the Python C source, you'll notice that probably 50% of
> the code is devoted to error handling (that was a guess).

That's a lot of error handling..


thanks!
mark.
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