RuntimeError?
Tim Peters
tim_one at email.msn.com
Tue Jun 29 03:15:07 EDT 1999
[RuntimeError ... generally seems to mean something bad and unexpected
happened, but not bad enough to shut down the interpreter (things *that*
bad raise SystemError).
]
[Gerrit Holl]
> Ah, I understand. But what kind of things are bad enough to raise
> SystemError? core dump?
>>> print SystemError.__doc__
Internal error in the Python interpreter.
Please report this to the Python maintainer, along with the traceback,
the Python version, and the hardware/OS platform and version.
>>>
That means something has happened Python can't figure out -- it's a problem
in Python itself (or in some C code you wrote to extend Python), not a
problem in your Python code. This is the kind of thing that *could* cause a
core dump (or other random damage) if Python didn't check for it first.
It's hard to give you an example, since if I could I'd have to report it to
the Python maintainer and he'd fix it before you could reproduce it <wink>.
Core dumps are even worse -- that's something so bad Python didn't even
check for it first, or didn't check for it correctly. For example, if you
have unbounded recursion:
def f():
f()
f()
Python does check how many levels deep f calls itself, and raises an
exception if it gets "too deep". Under Windows, though, the check in 1.5.2
doesn't quite work, and Python dies with a stack overflow in the operating
system. Python never wants that to happen! There's no chance for your
Python program to recover from it.
read-Lib/exceptions.py-for-more-entertainment-ly y'rs - tim
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