The Samurai Principle

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 12 Sep 2010 12:08:26 +1200, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

>> And that is exactly the reason why the Samurai Principle says to not
>> return None when the function fails to do what it intended to do.
> 
> How can the function “fail” when it returns what it is specified to
> return?


Are you trolling?

On the unlikely event that you're not, if you have a function called 
"len", the *intent* of the function is to return the length of its 
argument. That's why it's called "len" rather than "raise_exception" or 
"return_none", say.

The use of the term "fail" is entirely unexceptional here. It is normal 
English to say such things as "the function re.match() returns None if 
the regular expression fails to match" or "if we fail to acquire a lock, 
raise an Exception".


-- 
Steven