On Sat, Apr 11, 2020 at 3:31 AM Greg Ewing
On 11/04/20 2:34 am, Chris Angelico wrote:
AttributeError, KeyError/IndexError, and GeneratorExit (and StopAsyncIteration) want to say hi too.
Okay, there are a few others. But the important thing for our purposes is that APIs designed specifically to use exceptions for flow control (such as StopIteration and GeneratorExit) define their own special exceptions for the purpose. Nothing else raises them, so it's usually fairly safe to catch them.
On the other hand, I don't really think of AttributeError, KeyError or IndexError as exceptions intended primarily for flow control. To my mind they're in the same category as TypeError and ValueError -- they signal that you tried to do something that can't be done.
While you *can* use them for flow control, you need to be careful how you go about it. And there is usually another way to get the same result that doesn't require catching an exception, e.g, dict.get().
The only one of these that can be a bit of a problem is AttributeError, because there is no other way to attempt to get an attribute that may or may not be there (even hasattr() calls getattr() under the covers and catches AttributeError).
They all serve the same broad purpose - as mentioned, the protocol consists of "return this value" and needs a way to say "there is no value". StopIteration means "there is nothing to yield". AttributeError means "there is no such attribute". KeyError means "there is no such key". None of them are inherently flow control (apart from StopIteration's association with for loops); they're fundamentally about a protocol that has to be capable of returning *any* value, and also capable of signalling the absence of a value. (IMO dict.get() is the same as hasattr() - unless you duplicate the lookup code into it, the most logical way to implement it is to attempt a __getitem__ and, if it raises, return the default.) With every one of these protocols, it's entirely possible to mask a bug *in the protocol function itself* this way. If you're implementing __getitem__, you need to be careful not to accidentally leak a KeyError. One option would be to wrap everything: def __getitem__(self, item): try: if ...: return ... except KeyError: raise RuntimeError # If we didn't hit a return, then the key wasn't found raise KeyError Tada! No leakage. But much more commonly, __getitem__ is going to delegate in a way that means that a "leaked" KeyError is actually the correct behaviour. So it might be necessary to guard just *part* of the function: class LazyMapper: def __init__(self, func, base): ... def __getitem__(self, item): orig = self.base[item] # If this raises, let it raise try: return self.func(orig) # If this raises, it's a bug except KeyError: raise RuntimeError There's no way to solve this problem from the outside. The protocol exists for a reason, and exception handling is an extremely convenient way to delegate the entire protocol. The ONLY way to know which KeyErrors are bugs and which are correct use of protocol is to write the try/except accordingly. With this proposed "espace" mechanism, what you'd end up with is exactly the same, just inverted: def __getitem__(self, item): try: orig = self.base[item] except KeyError: raise KeyError in espace return self.func(orig) You STILL need to indicate which exceptions are proper use of protocol and which are leaks; only now, you can do that with a brand new mechanism with lots of overhead, instead of using the mechanism that we already have. The only reason that StopIteration is special in generators is that they *already* have a way to produce any value or to signal that there are no more values: "yield" and "return". That means it's actually possible to place the guard around the outside; and it also means that the implementation of the function doesn't clearly and obviously make use of an exception as protocol. If you're writing a __next__ method, it should be obvious that StopIteration is significant. If you're calling next(it) inside a __next__ method, then you're clearly and logically delegating. That's normal use of protocol. (And, in fact, there was some pushback to PEP 479 on the basis that generators were legitimately delegating to an unguarded next() call as part of protocol.) If you really want to handle things externally in some way, the only way would be to change the internal and external protocols. Maybe your __getitem__ function could be written to wrap its return value in a tuple, or to return an empty tuple if the item couldn't be found. Then you could have a simple wrapper: def __getitem__(self, key): try: result = self.__real__getitem__(key) except KeyError: raise RuntimeError if result: return result[0] raise KeyError But then it becomes that much harder for __real__getitem__ to delegate to something else. I don't think it really benefits us any. ChrisA