Need Help

[Michael Stone]

On Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 06:16:34PM -0500, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
> According to my software engineering professors, a program should
> always handle any input data without an assertion failure. Assertions
> are for catching bugs in internal invariants.  Therefore, any time an
> assertion failure is reached, it represents a bug.

My central error-handling goal has been to compactly express my
assumptions in a form that will prevent them from being violated in
ignorance. Should I have different goals?

> If Rainbow wants to disallow this, it should raise a specific exception.

Given your knowledge of Rainbow's clients, both human and software, what
would be gained by spending the time, documentation, and code required
to create and raise a specific exception for each unique way to violate
my assumptions?

> > > Can you enter a ticket about this? I don't know if Rainbow should
> > > abort the launch in these cases, but certainly should give a more
> > > helpful message.

Again, who is the audience for the message? It was clearly helpful for
Tomeu and me; it was clearly not as helpful for Waqas. Waqas - what
could Rainbow have done better for you?

Michael