FW: [Python-Dev] Patch 532638: Better AttributeError formatting

[Tim Peters]

Forwarded with permission.  I'm not sure why the thread died back then.

-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Mathewson [mailto:nickm@alum.mit.edu]
Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2002 4:53 PM
To: tim.one@comcast.net
Subject: Re: [Python-Dev] Patch 532638: Better AttributeError formatting


Hello, Tim!

I see on Python-dev that you've written:
> *Someone* has written a "lazy msg exception class" before in the core,
> and it may even have been me.  If it wasn't me, pipe up and give Skip a
> nudge in the right direction (OTOH, if it was me, maybe I'll remember
> tomorrow).

I wrote something similar during a case-sensitivity debate in May of 2000.

You can archived threads at:
     http://mail.python.org/pipermail/patches/2000-May/thread.html

Relevant threads are:
   "From comp.lang.python: A compromise on case-sensitivity"
   "Patch: AttributeError and NameError: second attempt"

IIRC, people eventually decided not to include these patches because (a)
cased-base warnings seemed not-worth-it, and (b) they used circular 
references, which Python could not at the time garbage-collect.

An interesting factoid: lazy exception messages seemed to increase
AttributeError performance by about 33%.

HTH,
-- 
Nick <nickm@alum.mit.edu>