[Edu-sig] Re: What do files and exceptions have in common?

[Kent Johnson]

Scott David Daniels wrote:
> Kent Johnson wrote:
> 
>> what do files and 
>> exceptions have to do with each other, pedagogically? 
> 
> I suspect the reason is that coping with files brings unavoidable
> errors in from the environment.

Good point. As soon as you start reading files, you open yourself up to 
the viccisitudes of real world data. In fact, a fairly common error on 
the Tutor list is an IndexError coming from programs like this:

for line in open(...):
   data = line.split()
   # do something with data[0], data[1], data[2]

when the input file contains a blank line. Sounds like a great way to 
introduce exceptions!

Thanks,
Kent