What's wrong with stack traces in short scripts? I use D all the time for short (< a few hundred lines) scripts and sometimes I use Python instead when I need a library that's not easily available in D or need to share my code with Python hackers. I honestly prefer Python's "always print a stack trace" to D's "make me fire up a debugger" for anything over ~50 lines (the point where I start to use functions instead of just writing all my code inline in main()).<br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 11:52 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:andrei@erdani.com">andrei@erdani.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">Steve Schveighoffer wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
Um, no. Exceptions can easily be uncaught (oops, forgot a try catch!). I don't want the end result of an uncaught exception to be a bug that's impossible or difficult to determine because no stack trace was printed. Let's consider that an exception may not be easily repeated and is most likely encountered by a user, not a developer. Giving a mechanism to communicate the problem as completely as possible from the user developer should be the default.<br>
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We should classify any exception or error that gets thrown outside of main to be an exception that was not planned for by the developer, and therefore a program error. This should trigger as much info as possible, definitely including a stack trace, and possibly a core dump (though, dumping core after catching an exception is next to useless).<br>
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If you want to avoid printing stack traces, catch the exception inside of main. I don't think it's too much to ask.<br>
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That argument goes both ways, i.e. I could tell you it's not much to ask to insert a try/catch if you care about the stack trace.<br>
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It comes back to doing a sensible thing by default. main() without a try/catch is common in short scripts. I am currently _exceedingly_ happy that I'm able to write 10-line scripts that do something interesting and behave reasonably in all circumstances. Obviously, a stack trace is not something anyone would be interested in for a short script. You are saying that I should take a size hit in order to protect you from adding 6 lines to a 100,000 lines program.<br>
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D should be script-friendly, it's a huge boon and a huge appeal, and stack traces don't go with script friendliness. Serious programs can afford the slight overhead.<br>
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See my point?<br><font color="#888888">
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Andrei</font><div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
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