On Wed, 06 May 2009 20:21:38 -0700, TomF wrote:
>> The only reason you would bother going to the time and effort of
>> catching the error, printing your own error message, and then exiting,
>> is if you explicitly want to hide the traceback from the user.
>
> Well, to me, exposing the user to such raw backtraces is unprofessional,
> which is why I try to catch user-caused errors. But I suppose I have an
> answer to my question.
That depends on your audience. Not every program is written to be used
for a technical incompetent audience. Some users actually *want* to see
the errors.
But certainly there are large classes of applications where you do want
to suppress the traceback. That's why I said "if you explicitly want to
hide the traceback from the user" rather than "don't do this".
The idiom I use is to wrap the *entire* application in a single
try...except block, and then put all your user-friendly error handling in
one place, instead of scattered over the entire application:
try:
main(sys.argv[1:])
except KeyboardInterrupt, SystemExit:
raise
except Exception, e:
log(e)
print >>sys.stderr, str(e)
sys.exit(1)
Hope this helps.
--
Steven
--
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