Raymond Hettinger wrote: > 2. There is a lesson to be taken from a story in the ACM risks forum > where a massive phone outage was traced to a single line of C code that > ran a "break" to get out of a nested if-statement. The interesting part > is that this was known to be mission critical code yet the error > survived multiple, independent code reviews. The problem was that the > code created an optical illusion. We risk the same thing when an > "except Exception" doesn't catch ControlFlowExceptions. The > recovery/logging handler will look like it ought to catch everything, > but it won't. That is a disaster for fault-tolerant coding and for > keeping your sales demo from exploding in front of customers.
I think that ControlFlowException should inherit from Exception, because it is an exception. As Raymond says, it's hard to spot this when in a hurry. But looking at the current PEP 348, why not rename BaseException to Exception and Exception to Error? That way, you could say "except Error:" instead of most of today's bare "except:" and it's clear that StopIteration or GeneratorExit won't be caught because they are not errors. Reinhold -- Mail address is perfectly valid! _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
