Friendly version 0.3 has been released

Friendly version 0.3 has been released. This version also marks the official name change from the former friendly-traceback.

Before I started working on Friendly, I assumed that to do custom exception handling, one simply had to redefine sys.excepthook. However, I since found out that this does not work in many environments, including all those based on IPython (which include Jupyter notebooks). Even Python's IDLE, at least up until Python version 3.10.0a5, does not work with a simple replacement of sys.excepthook.

Additionally, creating coloured output varies depending on the programming environment. Thankfully, this can be done in most environments simply by using Rich -- sometimes supplemented by a bit of additional code.

As a result, friendly includes various custom modules so that it can work with the following:

• IDLE (see this and the following 2 pages)
• Mu (see four pages starting here)
• Jupyter notebooks and Jupyter Lab (which also work with Google colab)
• IPython console
• VS Code (either running from the terminal or with embedded notebooks)

Friendly has now over 200 test cases. Most of these are not unit tests, but instead are integration tests: given code X that raises exception Y (including message Z), ensure that the output is as expected.  For example, suppose that after module M is imported, we try to use attribute A containing a typo. Such a base scenario might need 2 test cases to over all possibilities: whether we can find an attribute that is a similar word, likely indicating a typo, or not.  Here's an example of what one can get in the first scenario:

>>> import math
>>> a = math.sine(1)

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<friendly-console:2>", line 1, in <module>
a = math.sine(1)
AttributeError: module 'math' has no attribute 'sine'

Did you mean one of the following: `sin, sinh, asin`?

Friendly included a "hint" (Did you mean one of the...). Further information can be obtained by using what(), why(), where(), etc., as described in previous posts.

[Note to self: for the above example, the hint should only include the most likely candidate, namely 'sin', leaving the other choices for the longer explanation done with "why()", as was done for other type of exceptions.]

Currently, about half of the test cases are examples of SyntaxError. I suspect that this will continue to be the case as work on friendly continues and the total number of test cases continues to grow. I would not be surprised if the total number of test cases were to double by the time version 1.0 is ready.  My goal for version 1.0 is to try to cover all possible exception cases that can occur when making mistakes while trying to use code from Python's standard library.

Going back in history

Imagine that you wish to run a program that takes a long time to run. Just in case somethings goes wrong, you decide to use friendly-traceback (soon to be renamed...) in interactive mode to run it.  This turns out to be a good decision:

Time to explore what might be the problem, and where exactly things might have gone wrong.

Ooops ... a silly typo. Easy enough to correct:

Unfortunately, that did not work: Friendly-traceback, like all Python programs designed to handle exceptions, only capture the last one.

This has happened to me so many times; granted, it was always with short programs so that I could easily recreate the original exception. However, I can only imagine how frustrating it might be for beginners encountering this situation.

A solution

Fortunately, you are using the latest version of Friendly-traceback, the one that records exceptions that were captured, and allows you to discard the last one recorded (rinse, and repeat as often as needed), thus going back in history.

Now that we are set, we can explore further to determine what might have gone wrong.

Friendly-traceback will have a new name

tl; dr: I plan to change the name from friendly_traceback to friendly.