On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 1:05 AM Christopher Reimer < christopher_rei...@icloud.com> wrote:
> On 4/17/2016 3:18 PM, Michael Selik wrote: > > > I'd rather turn the question around: how much sanity checking is > > necessary or useful? You'll find the answer is "surprisingly little" > > compared to your experience in Java. > > I'm looking for a pythonic approach to sanity checking. From what I read > elsewhere, sanity checking belongs in the unit tests and/or library > classes designed for other people to use. I haven't seen many examples > of sanity checks that is common in Java. > > > For example, you don't need to > > explicitly check whether the color is present in your dictionary, > > because it'll give you a KeyError if you look up a bad key. > > Without the sanity check against the constant dictionary, the color > variable could be anything (it should be a string value). Looking at the > code again, I should relocate the sanity checks in the Piece base class. > Why relocate rather than remove? What message would you provide that's better than ``KeyError: 42`` with a traceback that shows exactly which dictionary is being used and how? > Why does the len of positions need to be 16? > > The positions variable is list of coordinates for 16 chess pieces (eight > pawns, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, a king and a queen) for each > color, locating the pieces on either the bottom quarter (i.e., [(1,1), > ..., (2,8)]) or the top quarter (i.e., [(7,1), ..., (8,8)]) of the board. > I meant, what goes wrong if the number of positions input is other than 16? Without these "sanity" checks, your functions might be reusable in, say, a checkers game. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
