From: James Britt Date: 2006-10-13T14:02:53+09:00 Subject: Re: Silent out-of-index problems--how much of a problem are they really? Kenneth McDonald wrote: > As a Python user starting to mess around with Ruby, one of my biggest > concerns is the fact that so many operations on lists 'fail silently' Is it *failing*, or simply returning a value that does not map to your current expectations? > ... > This isn't a criticism of Ruby. (Well, one aspect maybe). I'm looking at > Ruby because there are a lot of things (documentation tools, > consistency, gems, others) that it does better than Python. But I do > worry about silent index errors. Similar (rhetorical) question: What makes this an index *error*? I think that the degree of difficulty people have in tracking down undesired behavior is a factor of their beliefs about what the language "should" do. This is along the same lines of people having issues with zero being True, or with zero-based indexing, or significant indentation. There's no objective reality for a programming language, no absolute right or wrong for how it behaves. The best one can hope for is a consistent internal universe. -- James Britt "People want simple stories."