Perl is worse!

[Martijn Faassen]

Steve Lamb <grey at despair.rpglink.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 30 Jul 2000 01:55:43 +0200, Alex Martelli <alex at magenta.com> wrote:
>>Which is what most computer work is doing, though the DB's may
>>not be relational ones.  Files, mailboxes, documents, saved
>>games, newsgroups, sites -- call them as you wish, they do
>>persist (hopefully:-) and your data are right there.

>     I am aware of that.  So a problem in IO routine that don't interact with
> those, with display routines, mouse input for positioning alone, etc should
> all crap out just to protect the data?  That seems utterly foolish.  Sounds
> like the reason that Microsoft software crashes so much. Oh no, the mouse
> moved the wrong way, CRASH!!!!

Buggy software is bad. It either freezes the program, crashes it, or garbles
your data (or if you use a bad OS, crashes the machine). As I said before,
a programming language can *help* you detect bugs as soon as possible,
and it can offer you the ability to recover from the bug or unexpected
condition. It cannot magically repair bugs. So what is you want?

[snip]
>     BTW, you are aware that it is possible that such crash outs on minor
> things are just as apt to currupt the persistant database as anything else?

I have quite a bit of experience working with relational databases, and
a good relational database  does not go corrupt when the program crashes.
Among other things, relational databases have a concept called 'transactions'
which help here.

I also have quite a bit experience working with an object database, the
Zope Object Database. It makes Python objects persistent. It also has
transactions. Due to various errors on my part and on the part of others,
I have seen many many exceptions Zope. And I haven't seen a corrupted
object database yet in the last year and a half, because Zope catches the
exceptions, handles them, and rolls back the transaction that could've
corrupted the database.

And what is your experience regarding databases and exceptions in Python?

Regards,

Martijn
-- 
History of the 20th Century: WW1, WW2, WW3?
No, WWW -- Could we be going in the right direction?