[Python-Dev] Are undocumented exceptions considered bugs? (original) (raw)

Stefan Bucur stefan.bucur at gmail.com
Wed Apr 3 12:47:28 CEST 2013

On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 2:09 AM, Devin Jeanpierre <jeanpierreda at gmail.com>wrote:

On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 11:21 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote: > In this specific case, the error message is > confusing-but-not-really-wrong, due to the "two-types-in-one" nature > of Python 2.x strings - 8-bit strings are used as both text sequences > (generally not containing NUL characters) and also as arbitrary binary > data, including encoded text (quite likely to contain NUL bytes).

With your terminology, three types: char, non-NUL-text, encoded-text (e.g. what happens with ord('ab')) That's pretty silly, considering that these are all one Python type, and TypeError is raised into Python code. Obviously it can't change, because of historical reasons, but documenting it would be straightforward and helpful. These are not errors you can just infer will happen, you need to see it via documentation, reading the source, or experimentation (and re experimentation, then you have to establish whether or not this was an accident or deliberate).

Thanks for your answers, guys, and sorry for replying so late (had a research paper submission deadline in the mean time...). Filing a bug report for this issue sounds like a good idea. I have just submitted http://bugs.python.org/issue17624

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