btcd/txscript/doc.go
Dave Collins fdc2bc867b
txscript: Significantly improve errors.
This converts the majority of script errors from generic errors created
via errors.New and fmt.Errorf to use a concrete type that implements the
error interface with an error code and description.

This allows callers to programmatically detect the type of error via
type assertions and an error code while still allowing the errors to
provide more context.

For example, instead of just having an error the reads "disabled opcode"
as would happen prior to these changes when a disabled opcode is
encountered, the error will now read "attempt to execute disabled opcode
OP_FOO".

While it was previously possible to programmatically detect many errors
due to them being exported, they provided no additional context and
there were also various instances that were just returning errors
created on the spot which callers could not reliably detect without
resorting to looking at the actual error message, which is nearly always
bad practice.

Also, while here, export the MaxStackSize and MaxScriptSize constants
since they can be useful for consumers of the package and perform some
minor cleanup of some of the tests.
2017-01-12 13:12:39 -06:00

43 lines
1.9 KiB
Go

// Copyright (c) 2013-2017 The btcsuite developers
// Use of this source code is governed by an ISC
// license that can be found in the LICENSE file.
/*
Package txscript implements the bitcoin transaction script language.
A complete description of the script language used by bitcoin can be found at
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script. The following only serves as a quick
overview to provide information on how to use the package.
This package provides data structures and functions to parse and execute
bitcoin transaction scripts.
Script Overview
Bitcoin transaction scripts are written in a stack-base, FORTH-like language.
The bitcoin script language consists of a number of opcodes which fall into
several categories such pushing and popping data to and from the stack,
performing basic and bitwise arithmetic, conditional branching, comparing
hashes, and checking cryptographic signatures. Scripts are processed from left
to right and intentionally do not provide loops.
The vast majority of Bitcoin scripts at the time of this writing are of several
standard forms which consist of a spender providing a public key and a signature
which proves the spender owns the associated private key. This information
is used to prove the the spender is authorized to perform the transaction.
One benefit of using a scripting language is added flexibility in specifying
what conditions must be met in order to spend bitcoins.
Errors
Errors returned by this package are of type txscript.Error. This allows the
caller to programmatically determine the specific error by examining the
ErrorCode field of the type asserted txscript.Error while still providing rich
error messages with contextual information. A convenience function named
IsErrorCode is also provided to allow callers to easily check for a specific
error code. See ErrorCode in the package documentation for a full list.
*/
package txscript