Traceback is a mechanism to display the sequence of subprogram calls that leads to a specified execution point in a program. Often (but not always) the execution point is an instruction at which an exception has been raised. This mechanism is also known as stack unwinding because it obtains its information by scanning the run-time stack and recovering the activation records of all active subprograms. Stack unwinding is one of the most important tools for program debugging.
The first entry stored in traceback corresponds to the deepest calling level, that is to say the subprogram currently executing the instruction from which we want to obtain the traceback.
Note that there is no runtime performance penalty when stack traceback is enabled, and no exception is raised during program execution.