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    You're using the words "fail fast" and "brittle" in a way that may not be immediately obvious. Your question doesn't show how your goals might be in conflict. That small fragment of code looks perfectly fine so far. Commented Jul 13, 2024 at 4:36
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    People using case and whitespace variants with obvious meanings is not a "condition that is likely to indicate a failure", hence any advice that "fail fast" might imply does not apply. Commented Jul 13, 2024 at 8:59
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    Is there an agreed-upon format for the csv? If it is agreed that the values will have the specific case, then it would be appropriate to fail on case-mismatch, since it might indicate a bug which you need to investigate. E.g. hypothetically "Move" and "MOVE" could be different instructions. Commented Jul 13, 2024 at 9:17
  • @JacquesB thats the exact opposite of the highest voted answer Commented Jul 13, 2024 at 9:18
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    @NimChimpsky: The currently highest voted answer is bad advice. Postels Law is generally regarded as a mistake and have been denounced by the IETF. See ietf.org/archive/id/draft-iab-protocol-maintenance-05.html Quote: "Time and experience shows that negative consequences to interoperability accumulate over time if implementations apply the robustness principle. Commented Jul 13, 2024 at 9:25