On 3/14/07, Greg Ewing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Raymond Hettinger wrote:
>
> > The worst part of the new user experience is encountering a
> > SyntaxError. Because of the way we generate them, invalid
> > syntax errors are not very informative
>
> This seems like an argument for producing more informative
> error messages. Something like
>
> Syntax error: Numeric literal with leading zeroes is
> ambiguous. Use 0t123 for an octal literal, or omit the
> leading zeroes for a decimal literal.
>
> should make it pretty clear what the problem is and
> how to fix it.
What, you don't like:
>>> 09
File "<stdin>", line 1
09
^
SyntaxError: invalid token
I can't imagine why :)
Raymond makes a very good point that syntax errors are the bane of
newbies. When I started using Python, I was very impressed with the
accuracy and utility of the exception system. It may be that most
experienced programmers have similar feelings, so it would seem that
nobody has turned a critical eye on the reporting of errors to nervous
first-time programmers who are already worried they are going to break
the machine.
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