[Python-3000] Fwd: Re: Fwd: Re: Fwd: Re: Octal (original) (raw)

Patrick Maupin pmaupin at gmail.com
Thu Mar 15 05:25:10 CET 2007

On 3/14/07, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

Raymond Hettinger wrote:

> The worst part of the new user experience is encountering a > SyntaxError. Because of the way we generate them, invalid > syntax errors are not very informative This seems like an argument for producing more informative error messages. Something like Syntax error: Numeric literal with leading zeroes is ambiguous. Use 0t123 for an octal literal, or omit the leading zeroes for a decimal literal. should make it pretty clear what the problem is and how to fix it.

What, you don't like:

09 File "", line 1 09 ^ SyntaxError: invalid token

I can't imagine why :)

Raymond makes a very good point that syntax errors are the bane of newbies. When I started using Python, I was very impressed with the accuracy and utility of the exception system. It may be that most experienced programmers have similar feelings, so it would seem that nobody has turned a critical eye on the reporting of errors to nervous first-time programmers who are already worried they are going to break the machine.

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