I feel I gotta point out it’s a pretty funny example—email comes up so frequently as a thing that you’re recommended to neither parse nor validate, just try to send an email to the address and see if it works. If you need to know that it was received successfully, a link to click is the general method.
But “parse, don’t validate” is still a generally good idea, no matter the example used. :)
I don’t see it. I would much prefer to validate early rather than late. The example of ‘other code might validate it differently or not at all’ seems specious. I don’t want invalid information “deep within the bowels of the system”.
Parsing is a way of “validating early”. You either get a successful parse and the program continues working on known-good data with that knowledge encoded in the type system, or you handle incorrect data as soon as it’s encountered.
I feel I gotta point out it’s a pretty funny example—email comes up so frequently as a thing that you’re recommended to neither parse nor validate, just try to send an email to the address and see if it works. If you need to know that it was received successfully, a link to click is the general method.
But “parse, don’t validate” is still a generally good idea, no matter the example used. :)
I don’t see it. I would much prefer to validate early rather than late. The example of ‘other code might validate it differently or not at all’ seems specious. I don’t want invalid information “deep within the bowels of the system”.
Parsing is a way of “validating early”. You either get a successful parse and the program continues working on known-good data with that knowledge encoded in the type system, or you handle incorrect data as soon as it’s encountered.