Re: Denial of denial of service

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From: Peter da Silva
Subject: Re: Denial of denial of service
Date: 14:55 on 28 Jan 2007
> I don't have a positive experience to cite when it comes to 
> *recovering* from errors in complex cases. But if you need to *detect* 
> errors, a call stack is better than "Is a directory" printed by hell 
> knows what buried hell knows where. And you can do things like run a 
> lot of test modules and save the points of failure easily.

If I run a command and I get "/some/obscure/file: No such file of 
directory" I've got a place to start winkling at the problem. If I run 
a command and I get "peter: Not a typewriter" I've got jack.

I don't run a command and get a traceback, because nobody ever lets the 
traceback go through to the end user, because it looks 
"unprofessional". End users complain. They think the code ain't 
finished, because they don't know that's one of the hateful things 
about software.

> These buggers can fairly easily pass the wrong error code upstream 
> (or, more frequently, pass less and less specific error codes until 
> you end up with "hmm, something is wrong somewhere" at the top level).

That's true, if you're going to do the wrong thing, you can always do 
the wrong thing. The hateful thing about exceptions is they make it 
hard to do the *right* thing. Because exceptions were designed to make 
things easier for people who were too lazy to do the right thing.

There's stuff above here

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