[pypy-dev] Re: deep breakage

[Armin Rigo]

Hello Guido,

On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 09:54:30AM -0400, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > This is the same problem as in CPython. Most failing internal
> > operations call PyErr_SetString(), which causes a string to be used
> > as the exception value.
> 
> No, as the argument to the exception constructor.

Well, it is used as the exception value internally (stored in exc_value) until
some other part of code that actually wants to show the exception to Python
code normalizes it. This is what I was proposing to remove (and let our
equivalent of PyErr_SetString() immediately build the exception instance). I'm
not too concerned about building a StopIteration instance too much right now.  
We could even have a single pre-built instance of it for performance purposes
(later).

> I would not even bother.  String exceptions are strongly deprecated
> part of the language.

Ok. I tend to write occasionally 'raise "this-should-not-happend!"', but never
'raise X, Y' where X is a string. If it's not just me, I guess that this
limited backwards support could be quite easily hacked in by having 'raise
String' default to 'raise Exception, String', then.


A bientôt,

Armin.