Paul Rubin wrote: > James Stroud <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >>>approach. Basically this is reverse engineering the interface from the >>>source at the time of writing the app. >> >>This is using the source as documentation, there is no law against >>that. > > That's completely bogus. Undocumented interfaces in the library > source are allowed to change between Python versions and across Python > implementations. If you write your application according to the > documented interfaces in the Python manual, it should not break when > someone upgrades to the next Python release. You should not have to > depend on undocumented aspects of the Python implementation which > change out of sync with the application. >
My suggestion was to use some common sense about the source code and apply it. I've wasted many hours programming to faulty documentation when a quick peek at the source code would have saved some serious time. How do you think I happened accross the technique? I would wager that, in 10 years time, the urllib2 module will not raise any exceptions that don't inheret from urllib2.URLError or a built-in (i.e. documented) exception; unless, of course, someone made a change in a deliberate attempt to win said wager ;o) >>How things are and how things should be have always been 2 entirely >>different things. See early books by Robert J. Ringer for a more >>complete discussion. > > That's like saying programs shouldn't have bugs, but they often do > anyway. It doesn't mean the bugs are a good thing or that they > shouldn't be fixed. The original reference was to the internet, which seems vast in its sources of unforseen peril. If some gracious soul aspires to fix every bug in the internet, I invite him to be my guest. James -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
