Exception handling wart in Python

[David Bolen]

"David Abrahams" <david.abrahams at rcn.com> writes:

>                   (...)                        In general it is not so
> important to know exactly which exceptions can be thrown -- you can always
> handle anything with except: (or catch(...) in C++); all that's lost is the
> ability to report errors accurately. That's a loss, but not as serious a
> loss as what you give up when you don't know:

You should still be able to report the cause of the exception
accurately even in the catch-all case.  You've got the sys.exc_info()
information to decode and/or print a traceback if you want.  Or, you
could use something like:

    except Exception, value:
	(...)

to get a normal exception instance.  Of course, the latter will only
catch class-based exceptions, so you'd still need a raw except: if you
might get string exceptions.

This sort of thing can be very helpful as a last ditch catch-all
exception handler in an application that can print out a nice
traceback to a log or something, and then restart a master loop in an
application to provide at least a restart mechanism in the event of
unanticipated failure.

--
-- David
-- 
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