[Tutor] try..except - what about that ton of **Error statements?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On 22/05/13 23:37, boB Stepp wrote:
> On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 8:07 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
>> On 22/05/13 16:20, Jim Mooney wrote:
>>>>
>
> [...}
>
>> A very important quote from Chris Smith:
>>
>> "I find it amusing when novice programmers believe their main job is
>> preventing programs from crashing. ... More experienced programmers realize
>> that correct code is great, code that crashes could use improvement, but
>> incorrect code that doesn't crash is a horrible nightmare."
>>
>
> Being a novice programmer, I am interpreting this to mean that a) I
> complete a program. b) I believe it to be correct and bug-free. c) I
> should make sure I do NOT try to catch errors just to keep the program
> running from things I failed to anticipate (Probably from being a
> novice programmer!). So the conclusion I am drawing is that I WANT my
> program to crash if something I did not anticipate/plan for happens.
> Am I understanding this correctly?


Yes!


Well, within reason. If you are programming in C, a crash can be a nasty thing to deal with. It could cause memory corruption, leading to a Blue Screen of Death or equivalent. In the absolute worst case, low-level C or assembly bugs can actually cause hardware damage! So you don't want to be writing low-level code like that if you can avoid it.

But in a high-level language like Python, exceptions are not to be feared. They are perfectly safe, and should be welcomed, since they show you where your code needs to be improved.


-- 
Steven