On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 11:58 PM, Ben Finney <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> wrote:
Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> writes:
On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 2:44 PM, Ben Finney <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> wrote:
Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> writes:
When I am printing an object and I have no idea what type it is, I'll use repr() or "%r"; but when I know I am printing, say, an exception, I think it would be very nice if print(x) would just print its name.
-1. That makes the string representation of an exception much less useful.
Exceptions don't have names; each exception *type* has a name, but that doesn't distinguish instances of the type from one another. When there is an 'IOError' it's far more useful that the string representation contains the exception *message*, since the name of the exception type doesn't tell the user much about what went wrong.
You misunderstood me. I'm not proposing to change the str() of an exception *instance*.
That's what I take to be the meaning of “print an exception”. Like “print an int” or “print a list”, it seems to me that refers not to a type, but to an instance of the type.
Thanks for clarifying that you meant “print an exception class”.
Sorry, reading back what I wrote with less context it's clear how you could misread it. Since the proposal clearly started out limited to classes, functions and modules, the ambiguity never occurred to me. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)