[Python-Dev] with_traceback

[Guido van Rossum]

I am beginning to think that there are serious problems with attaching
the traceback to the exception; I really don't like the answer that
pre-creating an exception is unpythonic in Py3k.

On 2/28/07, Jean-Paul Calderone <exarkun at divmod.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 18:29:11 -0700, Adam Olsen <rhamph at gmail.com> wrote:
> >On 2/28/07, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> >> Adam Olsen wrote:
> >>
> >> > It sounds like we should always copy the exception given to raise,
> >>
> >> I don't like that either, for all the reasons that
> >> make it infeasible to copy an arbitrary object in a
> >> general way.
> >
> >Exceptions aren't arbitrary objects though.  The requirement that they
> >inherit from BaseException is specifically to create a common
> >interface.  Copying would be an extension of that interface.
> >
> >I believe calling copy.copy() would be sufficient.
> >
>
> Does copying every exception given to `raise' solve the problem being
> discussed here?
>
> Consider the current Python behavior: no copying is performed, most code
> instantiates a new exception instance for each raise statement, some code
> creates a single exception and re-raises it repeatedly.
>
> And the new behavior?  Every raise statement copies an exception instance,
> some code will create a new exception instance for each raise statement,
> some code will create a single exception and re-raise it repeatedly.
>
> That doesn't sound like an improvement to me.  Normal code will be more
> wasteful.  Code which the author has gone out of his way to tune will be
> as wasteful as /average/ code currently is, and more wasteful than tuned
> code now is.
>
> Plus you now have the added mental burden of keeping track of which objects
> are copies of what (and if you throw in the refcount=1 optimization, then
> this burden is increased - was something accidentally relying on copying or
> non-copying?  Did a debugger grab a reference to the exception object, thus
> changing the programs behavior?  Did a third-party hang on to an exception
> for longer than the raising code expected?  etc).
>
> Jean-Paul
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)