[Python-Dev] Bare except clauses in PEP 348

[Niko Matsakis]

> As for the rest, I'm not as sure and it would be helpful to get  
> thoughts
> from others on this one.  My sense is that blocking the clause from
> appearing in the middle is treating the symptom and not the disease.

+1

It would be better to prohibit bare except entirely (well, presumably  
at some point in the future with appropriate warnings at the moment)  
than change its semantics.  I agree that its intuitive meaning is "if  
anything is thrown", not, "if a non-programmer-error exception is  
thrown," but I'm not sure if that's even important.  The point is  
that it has existing well defined semantics; changing them just seems  
unnecessary to the aims of the rewrite and confusing to existing  
Python programmers.

I've written plenty of code with bare excepts and they all intended  
to catch *any* exception, usually in a user interface where I wanted  
to return to the main loop on programmer error not abort the entire  
program.  I don't relish the thought of going back and changing  
existing code, and I imagine there are few who do.



My 2 cents,
Niko