On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 8:27 AM, Karl Knechtel <zahl...@gmail.com> wrote: > I really wish gmail picked up the mailing list as a default reply-to > address...
There is some labs thing that makes "reply to all" the default if you click the button on the top-right. Unfortunately, that applies for non-mailing-lists too... > The easiest way is to try it. In fact, in most cases, this will be > easier than looking it up in the documentation could ever be, because > looking something up in documentation requires you to read through a > bunch of documentation until you find key info like 'raises FooError > in bar circumstance', and then interpret it; by trial and error, you > see exactly what happens right away, and you can do it by just banging > out a couple of lines on the REPL. Eh, this doesn't make sense. Before I would ever try the int() function, I would've read about it in the documentation -- otherwise how would I know what it does at all? How would I even know that it exists? What having to try-it-and-see does is give me extra steps to know what it does. Instead of only reading the documentation, now I have to both read the documentation *and* try it out in the interactive interpreter to see its behaviour in a bunch of undocumented error cases. What should actually happen is that the error cases should be documented explicitly, so that I don't have to run around in the REPL or orthogonal bits of documentation trying to figure out the behaviour of the function. > You should have already read the documentation for things like > ValueError as a part of learning the language (i.e. the first time > something raised a ValueError and you wanted to know what that meant); > or at the very least you should have a good idea of what the > "standard" exceptions are all named, and *develop an intuition* for > which apply to what circumstances. As noted by others, you should not > expect `int` to throw a `TypeError` when fed a bad string, because a > `TypeError` means "something is wrong with the type of some object", > and the problem with the bad string isn't that it's a string (its > type), but that the string contents are not interpretable as int (its > value, hence ValueError). And yet this is what ord does. Every rule has an exception. I concede that reading the docs on ValueError is probably worth doing the first time you see it. Although, it's also one of those exceptions that has a "clear" name, so it isn't something everyone will do. I'm not sure if I ever did it. And certainly the OP never looked there. -- Devin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
