[Python-Dev] Builtin exit, good in interpreter, bad in code. (original) (raw)

Sean Reifschneider jafo-python-dev at tummy.com
Mon Apr 24 03:55:53 CEST 2006

A friend of mine is learning Python, and had a problem with the exit builtin. I like that in the interpreter it gives useful information, but he was writing a program in a file and tried "exit(0)", and was presented with the non-obvious error:

TypeError: 'str' object is not callable

What about something like:

class ExitClass: ... def repr(self): ... return('Hey, press control-D') ... def call(self, value): ... raise SyntaxError, 'You want to use sys.exit' ... exit = ExitClass() exit Hey, press control-D exit(1) Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ? File "", line 5, in call SyntaxError: You want to use sys.exit

Jerub on #python thinks that maybe it needs to subclass the string object instead, but in general it seems like it might be an improvement.

Thoughts?

Thanks, Sean

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