undefined | Better HN

story

0 pointsWalkman11y ago0 comments

How you define "too long" and "too verbose"?

0 comments

Keep a running tally of time spent stringifying. If it passes 1000 msec over the entire life of the program, disable the feature.

As for length, maybe 100 chars? I think that's around what repr() often uses.

WalkmanOP11y ago

> Simple is better than complex.

I think Python exceptions are verbose enough, not necessary to make it more verbose, more complicated.

pmahoney11y ago

Can str() call into a C extension that then loops forever?

moe11y ago

Can we contrive esoteric situations where this feature would fail spectacularly? Yes.

Do they matter in reality? No.

Make it an optional feature to be toggled with an interpreter flag. People like me can turn it on, you can keep it turned off.

army11y ago

That doesn't seem that esoteric to me: in general the problem is that repr() can result in execution of arbitrary code, and that there's no way to cleanly and reliably terminate arbitrary code. This includes Python code: it's possible to terminate it at an arbitrary point, but that leaves things in an indeterminate state.

I think it's pretty important that you shouldn't add features with unpredictable behaviour into the core of the language, particularly into error handling code.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse