Re: [Python-ideas] Comparable exceptions

What if we make the hash from .args and .__dict__? That would cover most cases. For me it makes sense because they look like containers. There might be cases where a user doesn't want __eq__ or __hash__ for exception instances - how about we enable those methods just for the builtin types? And then the user can explicitly enable them for custom exceptions (there could be a special base ComparableException class that he could inherit from). Thanks, -- Ionel Cristian Mărieș, blog.ionelmc.ro On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 1:55 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

Actually, they don't have a __hash__ either -- they just inherit the default __hash__ from object, just as they inherit __eq__ from object (and both just use the address of the object). I can see many concerns with trying to define __eq__ for exceptions in general -- often there are a variety of fields, not all of which perhaps should be considered when comparing, and then there are user-defined exceptions which may have other attributes. I don't know what your use case was, but if, as you say, the exceptions you care about already have `args` attributes, maybe you should just compare that (and the type).

On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 3:43 PM, Ionel Cristian Mărieș

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wrote:

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Hey everyone,

I was writing a test the other day and I wanted to assert that some function raises some exception, but with some exact value. Turns out you cannot compare OSError("foobar") to OSError("foobar") as it doesn't have any __eq__. (it's the same for all exceptions?)

I think exceptions are great candidates to have an __eq__ method - they already have a __hash__ (that's computed from the contained values) and they are already containers in a way (they all have the `args` attribute).

Comparing exceptions in a test assertion seems like a good usecase for this.

Thanks, -- Ionel Cristian Mărieș, blog.ionelmc.ro

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-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)