Tbf python guidelines encourage it over if/else in cases like this. “Easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission” or something along the lines
Day 598 of asking for a way to tell which functions throw exceptions in Python so I can know when to wrap in try catch. Seems to me that every other language has this, but when I’ve asked for at least a linter that can tell me I’m calling a function that throws, the general answer has been “why would you want that?”
How am I supposed to ask for forgiveness if it’s impossible to know that I’m doing something risky in the first place?
Yeah, for this reason I would pretty much never encourage exceptions in Python over some other form of error handling. It’s so frustrating when called code throws some random exceptions that are completely undocumented. This is one of the few things Java got (sort of) right
I believe raises is the de facto Python version of throws, but no tools seem to exist to actually handle it.
cant practically anything throw an exception given the right (sometimes extremely remotely possible) circumstances?
Not really. Exceptions are a controlled way of indicating something went wrong in an application.
The only point where you wouldn’t know about the possibility of one is when you don’t know enough about the language features you’re using or when you use a badly documented library or framework.
Is this feature common in scripting/interpreted languages? Feels like those two things don’t work together.
Well at least php has it, which is a JITed scripting language just like Python. Although saying php has it is wrong, it’s just a special doc tag that the linters pick up. Which is exactly what I want for Python. The only other scripting language I’m very comfortable with is typescript, which can also support via jsdoc and eslint.
So to answer your question, I don’t know if it’s common, but from my minimal sample pool it’s at least not unheard of.
You may not know this (just guessing because you commented on the nature of scripting/interpreted languages) but static analysis of dynamic languages has come really far and is an indispensable part of any reasonably sized project written in them these days. That’s another reason why I’m so surprised and frustrated by the lack of this in Python.
Respectfully, no. Rust is great for some things and Python is great for other things. Switching to rust is not a solution to missing exception linting in another language.
python guidelines
Do you have a specific PEP you’re referencing or is this one of those “I assume this must be the case because of how common using try/except statements for flow control are” kind of things?
Pretty sure its not a PEP, but the python glossary mentions it. Searching ‘python EAFP’ brings up a lot of discussion on the topic too, so if nothing else its definitely a widespread phenomenon
Like most things in life, context matters. In the OP it seems like the check function is used specifically so it could raise a PaymentException if the payment hasn’t been received… That’s not a “forgiveness/permission” context, this is a yes or no question, hence should have been an if.
