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

Marc Tompkins marc.tompkins at gmail.com
Wed May 22 19:23:11 CEST 2013


On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 9:50 AM, boB Stepp <robertvstepp at gmail.com> wrote:

> I guess I'll pick the first alternative. However, this brings to mind
> my biggest gripe as a user of software, particularly here at work
> where the programmer obviously has no medical background: cryptic
> error messages that might be meaningful to the programmer, but are
> totally unhelpful to me, the user, who has to figure out what to do
> next.
>

I agree with you a LOT more strongly in the case of compiled languages,
where the error dump amounts to a memory location and a blob of
hexadecimal.  When that happens, nobody but the original programmer (or
software company) is likely to find out the cause, and even then not
without a symbolic debugger.  But in Python, the error messages/tracebacks
are fairly self-explanatory (to someone familiar with Python) and even
include the actual line number where the error occurred.  It's true that
the average end-user won't be able to fix it, but the pool of potential
help is actually quite wide.
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