[Python-ideas] Retrying EAFP without DRY

[Mike Meyer]

On Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:46:19 +0000
Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 21 January 2012 07:47, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> > This sounds like retry should be a flow-control statement, like continue or
> > break, not a block. E.g.:
> >
> > try:
> >    something()
> > except ValueError:
> >    if condition: retry
> >    else: raise
> >
> >
> > "retry" will jump back to the start of the try block -- a limited form of
> > GOTO, with all the pros and cons of this.
> 
> That's the way I would interpret a "retry" statement - and it's
> nothing like the OP's proposal as far as I can see (where retry
> introduces a suite).

Yes, it's not much like what I proposed. But it does solve the same
problem, and in a much better way than I proposed.

Because of that, I'm not going to try and fix the error in the OP of
not translating the proposal to proper Python :-(.

> I'd be -1 on a retry keyword that worked any way other than this
> (simply because this is "clearly" the most obvious interpretation).
> Whether a retry statement is worth having at all, though, is something
> I'm not sure of - I'd like to see some real-world use cases first.
> I've never encountered the need for it myself. And I can't honestly
> imagine why the while True...try...break" idiom would ever not be
> sufficient.

I saw a number of request for "real world uses cases". I thought I
covered that in the OP. This ideas was *prompted* by a real world use
case where we wanted to wrap an exception in our own private exception
before handling it. Because the code that would raise the exception
- other exceptions missing the attributes we added to ours - was the
code we want to run after handling them, we're left with LBYL or DRY
or wrapping a loop around the code when it wasn't really a loop.

   <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/
Independent Software developer/SCM consultant, email for more information.

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