Why not just show the out-of-range index?

[Paul McGuire]

I think your biggest initial recoil to the response you got was in the 
request that you submit a patch.  You thought, "Geez, I just want one 
friggin' error message changed, and they want me to learn the whole Python 
development environment."  Given your newbiness with Python, probably a 
better response to you would be, "Submit this as a feature request at the SF 
tracker page.  If you really feel ambitious, put together a patch to go with 
it, it will increase the likelihood of getting accepted about 50X."

A couple of other notes:
- The core developers do post here, but the real core Python development 
discussions go on on the pydev mailing list.
- Please recognize that you did get at least one response from John Machin, 
who scanned the code for this simple error message, and found that the 
impact was actually in about a dozen places (not uncommon when peeling away 
at the onion of source code, you've probably seen this yourself).  This gave 
all of us a better appreciation of the size of the effort required for what 
initially seemed like a 30-second job. (BTW, there are *never* any 30-second 
jobs, especially in a package the size of Python.)

So let me echo the effbot and ask that you submit this at the feature 
request tracker page on SF - I think you've spent more time in posting to 
this thread than it would have taken to submit this request.  If you don't 
want to learn the Python dev environment, that's fine, you might consider 
composing a pydev mailing list submission making your case on the merits of 
implementing some user-friendliness features, such as more explanatory error 
messages.  But the plain truth is, patches speak louder than words, on pydev 
even moreso than c.l.py.

-- Paul