[Python-Dev] pyc files, constant folding and borderline portability issues (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Tue Apr 7 23:09:13 CEST 2009

Cesare Di Mauro wrote:

On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 07:22PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

In my experience it's better to discover a bug at compile time rather than at running time. That's my point though, which you seem to be ignoring: if the user explicitly writes "1/0" it is not likely to be a bug. That's very different than "1/x" where x happens to take on zero at runtime -- that is likely bug, but a constant folder can't detect that (at least not for Python).

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) I agree. My only concern was about user mistyping that can leed to an error interceptable by a stricter constant folder. But I admit that it's a rarer case compared to an explicit exception raising such the one you showed.

I would guess that it is so rare as to not be worth bothering about.

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