Re: Discuss changing the behaviour of append()
- Posted by DerekParnell (admin) Jun 11, 2014
- 4770 views
Since append currently works the way I thought I remembered it did, I disagree Pete with your statement. The proposed change could break a working program.
For example a program could be designed to read in a text file, one line at a time, where each line in the file is supposed to start with a sequence followed by 3 atoms. ...
One of the better techniques in designing applications, is to always provide validity checking on data that comes from outside the program, as opposed to data that is generated by the program. It would be better, IMO, to validate the text file data before using that data. The application then can either fail gracefully or come to some other arrangement.
By the way, data that is generated by an application should be subject to 'logic' testing during the testing/debugging stages of an application's development, and not during live run times.
Thus from my point of view, I see that my suggested change would not break working programs but would break non-working programs 
