[Biococoa-dev] mass calculator bug

[John Timmer]

>> The use of tempDict is just basic error trapping.  If the file's
>> corrupted,
>> they key could be absent or malformed, so I check whether it's present
>> and a
>> valid NSDictionary before trying to use it.
>> 
>> If we were being really careful, I'd have an "else" statement that
>> threw an
>> exception, but I can't really decide how best to define exceptions at
>> this
>> point.
>> 
>> JT
> 
> This is the other example which triggered my safety vs speed email.
> WE provide the basic plist, so it should work period. I can see two
> reason why it couldn't. First, the download/installation went terribly
> wrong, in case this probably isn't the only thing broken and everything
> goes bananas. Second, the developer (or user) has tinkered/changed our
> plist, which he obviously did wrong. Why then save his *ss? He should
> simply repair/adjust the plist before shipping his app. I don't see a
> reason for the error checking code. To black and white?
> Alex


Here, I'd argue that we'd do a service to developers to throw an exception
that was informative.  If just one nucleotide got corrupted in the .plist,
it'd be a nightmare to figure out why the app was crashing (especially if it
was an ambiguous one that wasn't used often).  Even a good NSLog would be
better than nothing.

JT

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