[Python-3000] MemoryError oddities (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Jul 31 19:34:12 CEST 2008

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 10:32 AM, Neal Norwitz <nnorwitz at gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 9:36 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 10:07 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

+1 OverflowErrors should probably by reserved for numeric overflows.

In a sense, passing sys.maxsize as a string size is a numeric overflow - the size can't be represented in the available variable. I'm sure this is the source of the confusion. The problem is that if you specify a small enough value that you don't get into unrepresentable sizes, but still very large, you do get a MemoryError. For continuity it would be better to treat both the same, i.e. use MemoryError consistently. I just checked in a bunch of security patches that do not follow this convention. I wanted to avoid changing the patches we exchanged on the security list. The errors should be changed and made consistent. The patches were checked in to 2.4, 2.5, and trunk. Can someone make sure to forward port to 3k?

Let's first forward port these to 3k. In 2.6, I think we should leave the exceptions as they were. In 3.0 I think it's okay to change such OverflowErrors into MemoryErrors.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

More information about the Python-3000 mailing list