Stack traces

Let’s revisit the breakfast program from the foregoing quiz.

When you run this code, you get a stack trace. These traces are invaluable: they tell you what the program stack was when the exception was raised. Here’s the program output and trace:

Sizzle sizzle
Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "/home/main.py", line 27, in <module>
        make_breakfast()
    File "/home/main.py", line 5, in make_breakfast
        toast_bread()
    File "/home/main.py", line 18, in toast_bread
        raise ValueError("out of bread")
ValueError: out of bread

Notice a few things. We see the output, Sizzle sizzle, and then the stack trace starts with the word Traceback. Python helpfully informs you that the stack should be read bottom up: the lower the call, the more recent it was to when the exception was thrown. You can read a stack trace like a story:

• At first, we were running at the top-level. (That’s <module>.) On line 27, we called make_breakfast.

• When we were running make_breakfast, we called toast_bread on line 5.

• When we were running toast_bread, we raised an exception on line 18. We were out of bread.

There’s one more line of output, and it’s not really part of the stack trace: it’s the default exception handler in Python printing out the exception that made its way to the top level. If an exception is never caught by an except clause, then Python will print out the exception and exit.