[Python-Dev] PEP 463: Exception-catching expressions

[Nick Coghlan]

On 21 February 2014 22:42, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> It'd be a backward-incompatible change, but it's more likely to be
> what people expect. The general assumption of "with ... as ..." is
> that the thing should be used inside the block, and should be finished
> with when you exit the block, so having the name valid only inside the
> block does make sense.
>
> That's a completely separate proposal. But suppose that were to
> happen, and to not require a closure. It would then make good sense to
> be able to capture an exception inside an expression - and it could be
> done without breaking anything.
>
> So, if it is to be rejected, I'd say it's on the technical grounds
> that it would require a closure in CPython, and that a closure is
> incompatible with the current proposal. Does that sound right?
>
> (It's also not a huge loss, since it's almost unused. But it's an
> incompatibility between statement and expression form.)

It's probably OK to leave it in the deferred section and just note the
difficulty of implementing it in a backwards compatible way, since
we're *not* going to be introducing a closure. Python 3 except clauses
are already a bit weird anyway, since they do an implicit delete at
the end, but only if the except clause is actually triggered:


>>> e = "Hello"
>>> try:
...     1/0
... except ZeroDivisionError as e:
...     pass
...
>>> e
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'e' is not defined
>>> e = "Hello"
>>> try:
...     pass
... except Exception as e:
...     pass
...
>>> e
'Hello'

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia