Chris Angelico writes:
> Why create a new argument, then mandate that you use it everywhere,
> just to achieve what's already happening?
"Newbies don't read code backwards very well" seems to be the
point.
While I'm not of the school that "I learned this painfully, so newbies
should learn this painfully", I do think that novice Python
programmers should learn that
1. "None has no .xxx attribute" means that some previous code (often
but not always a regex match) was unable to perform some task
and returned None to indicate failure.
2. If the failure was expectable, your code is buggy because it
didn't test for None, and if it was unexpected, some code
somewhere is buggy because it allowed an invariant to fail.
On the cost side, there are so many cases where a more finely divided
Exception hierarchy would help novices quite a bit but experts very
little that this case (easy to learn) would open the floodgates. I
believe Guido has specifically advised against such a hierarchy. I'm
against this change.
Steve
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