Python style: exceptions vs. sys.exit()

[Grant Edwards]

On 2008-09-23, Drake <cjdrake at gmail.com> wrote:

> My group is developing a medium-sized library of general-purpose
> Python functions, some of which do I/O. Therefore it is possible for
> many of the library functions to raise IOError Exceptions. The
> question is: should the library function be able to just dump to
> sys.exit() with a message about the error (like "couldn't open this
> file"),

No.  A library module should never call sys.exit().

> or should the exception propagate to the calling program which
> handles the issue?

Yes.  Let the application handle the error if it wants to. If
it's not handled, it'll end up causing the program to exit.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow! It's a hole all the
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