How much sanity checking is required for function inputs?

Christopher Reimer christopher_reimer at icloud.com
Mon Apr 18 00:04:04 EDT 2016


On 4/17/2016 3:18 PM, Michael Selik wrote:

> I'd rather turn the question around: how much sanity checking is
> necessary or useful? You'll find the answer is "surprisingly little"
> compared to your experience in Java.

I'm looking for a pythonic approach to sanity checking. From what I read 
elsewhere, sanity checking belongs in the unit tests and/or library 
classes designed for other people to use. I haven't seen many examples 
of sanity checks that is common in Java.

> For example, you don't need to
> explicitly check whether the color is present in your dictionary,
> because it'll give you a KeyError if you look up a bad key.

Without the sanity check against the constant dictionary, the color 
variable could be anything (it should be a string value). Looking at the 
code again, I should relocate the sanity checks in the Piece base class.

> Why does the len of positions need to be 16?

The positions variable is list of coordinates for 16 chess pieces (eight 
pawns, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, a king and a queen) for each 
color, locating the pieces on either the bottom quarter (i.e., [(1,1), 
..., (2,8)]) or the top quarter (i.e., [(7,1), ..., (8,8)]) of the board.

Thanks,

Chris R.



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