On Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:25:26 -0700, Drake wrote: > I have a general question of Python style, or perhaps just good > programming practice. > > My group is developing a medium-sized library of general-purpose Python > functions, some of which do I/O. Therefore it is possible for many of > the library functions to raise IOError Exceptions. The question is: > should the library function be able to just dump to sys.exit() with a > message about the error (like "couldn't open this file"), or should the > exception propagate to the calling program which handles the issue? > > Thanks in advance for anyone who can either answer my question or point > me to where this question has already been answered.
Presumably somebody has suggested that calling sys.exit() was a good option. I'm curious to what possible reason they could give for such a poor choice. Hint: if a library function can't open a file, the application should be given the opportunity to open a different file. Or do something completely different instead. Whatever. That's not up to the library to decide, not even if the library is in such a broken state that it can't continue. Why not? Because the application might deal with that by unloading the library and continuing regardless. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
