Re: Does anyone have "assert" blindness ?

[Steve Litt <slitt@...>]

On Wednesday 09 March 2011 06:02:19 Axel Kittenberger wrote:
> In my opinion the core of that problem results in the Lua style of
> setting things to nil on error and hoping the nil will raise an error
> later on, instead of a more elaborated error system. The careful coder
> thus has to assert anything to be not nil, if s/he wants the error to
> be reported where it was caused, or worse to be oversighted at all
> (like e.g. a nil into a variable which is later tested as a boolean
> condition).

Hi Axel,

I agree with everything you say, but personally I wouldn't characterize it as 
a problem. When I'm first coding something, working hard to keep the design in 
my mind as my fingers put it into a source file, I have no time or mental 
energy to think of error handling details. So I assert anything that can go 
wrong. Later I can search for asserts and install proper error handling where 
necessary. 

I did this in C long before I'd ever heard of Lua -- it works well when 
writing new code when you don't want to divert attention to try/catch/finally, 
which has always seemed ponderous to me, and memorizing various exceptions.

SteveT

Steve Litt
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