how to stop python

[Dan]

bruce bedouglas at earthlink.net posted:

 > perl has the concept of "die". does python have anything
 > similar. how can a python app be stopped?

I see this sort of statement a lot in Perl:
     open(FH, "myfile.txt") or die ("Could not open file");

I've no idea why you're asking for the Python equivalent to die, but if 
it's for this sort of case, you don't need it.  Usually in Python you 
don't need to explicitly check for an error.  The Python function will 
raise an exception instead of returning an error code.  If you want to 
handle the error, enclose it in a try/except block.  But if you just 
want the program to abort with an error message so that you don't get 
silent failure, it will happen automatically if you don't catch the 
exception.  So the equivalent Python example looks something like this:
     fh = file("myfile.txt")

If the file doesn't exist, and you don't catch the exception, you get 
something like this:
$ ./foo.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "./foo.py", line 3, in ?
     fh = file("myfile.txt")
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'myfile.txt'

/Dan