[Python-Dev] breaking list.append()

[Ka-Ping Yee]

On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, Greg Stein wrote:
>
> What's the difference between a warning and an error? If you're running a
> program and it suddenly spits out a warning about a misuse of list.append,
> I'd certainly see that as "the program did something unexpected; that is
> an error."

A big, big difference.  Perhaps to one of us, it's the minor inconvenience
of reading the error message and inserting a couple of parentheses in the
appropriate file -- but to the end user, it's the difference between the
program working (albeit noisily) and *not* working.  When the program throws
an exception and stops, it is safe to say most users will declare it broken
and give up.

We can't assume that they're going to be able to figure out what to edit
(or be brave enough to try) just by reading the error message... or even
what interpreter flag to give, if errors (rather than warnings) are the
default behaviour.


-- ?!ng