[Python-Dev] Revert #12085 fix for del attribute error message (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Sep 23 10:17:51 CEST 2013

On 23 September 2013 16:11, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

Guido van Rossum wrote:

Somehow "unraisable" sounds too technical, It's not even really accurate. It's been raised, it just can't be propagated any further. But "unpropagatable exception" would be a bit of a mouthful.

I felt I needed a reminder of the context where this string gets printed, so I created this toy example:

class C: ... def del(self): ... raise RuntimeError("Going away now") ... x = C() del x Exception ignored in: <bound method C.__del__ of <__main__.C object at 0x7f98b8b61538>> Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 3, in del RuntimeError: Going away now

Here's what I suggest changing that error to:

del x Unraisable exception suppressed when calling <bound method C.__del__ of <__main__.C object at 0x7f98b8b61538>> Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 3, in del RuntimeError: Going away now

First and foremost, "Unraisable exception suppressed" should be quite search engine friendly. The only current hits for that are on archived versions of this thread, whereas the existing "Exception ignored" sends you down a rabbit hole of Stack Overflow answers related to broken pipe handling. If we create a new FAQ entry for "What does 'Exception ignored' or 'Unraisable exception suppressed' mean?" when making the change for 3.4, then that will definitely help 3.4 users and may eventually help users of other versions as well :)

Secondly, it concisely explains exactly what is going on, so developers that look it up once should be able to remember the meaning in the future:

I think it's OK for the terms to be a little technical and arcane because problems relating to broken finalizers and failures during interpreter startup and shutdown are a little arcane.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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