How much sanity checking is required for function inputs?
Christopher Reimer
christopher_reimer at icloud.com
Sun Apr 17 15:34:05 EDT 2016
Greetings,
I'm currently building a chess engine to learn the finer details of
Python. When I learned all flavors of Java in community college a decade
ago, we had to sanity check the hell out of the input values for every
function and wrote a lot of redundant code in addition to the
getters/setters code.
Here's the input sanity checking I got for a generator function to
return a set of chess pieces for a specified color and position.
def generate_set(color, positions):
if color not in [VARS['COLOR_BLACK'], VARS['COLOR_WHITE']]:
raise Exception("Require \'{}\' or \'{}\' for input value, got
\'{}\' instead.".format(VARS['COLOR_BLACK'], VARS['COLOR_WHITE'], color))
if len(positions) != 16:
raise Exception("Require 16 positions for input value, got {}
instead.".format(len(positions)))
The two sanity checks are fairly straight forward. Color input has to
match the color constant strings. Positions input has to have 16 items.
I *could* sanity check the positions input to determine if it had a list
of 16 valid coordinates. The reason I don't is because the code that
calls this function builds the coordinates from constants with valid
coordinates. However, if I was doing this in my Java classes, one of my
instructors rap me on the knuckles for not sanity checking to nth degree.
How much sanity checking is too much in Python?
Thank you,
Chris R
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