On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger@gmail.com> wrote:
On Aug 23, 2010, at 1:45 PM, Benjamin Peterson wrote:
2010/8/23 Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger@gmail.com>:
P.S. The current behavior seems to be deeply embedded:
Well, that's what happens when a behavior is added in 1990. :)
More generally: it is an API code smell whenever documentation promises something like "this always succeeds" ;-)
Changing C APIs is even harder than changing Python API because you can't add exceptions to something that wasn't returning exceptions before. We did that for comparisons in the past and it was a pain (but worth it). For these two little APIs I think it is not worth it, though it may be worth it to create new APIs that *do* return exceptions. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)