Pythonic way to determine if a string is a number

[Tino Wildenhain]

Roy Smith wrote:
> In article <gnaak5$1nek$1 at services.telesweet.net>,
>  Mel <mwilson at the-wire.com> wrote:
> 
>> Christian Heimes wrote:
>>> Roy Smith wrote:
>>>> They make sense when you need to recover from any error that may occur,
>>>> possibly as the last resort after catching and dealing with more specific
>>>> exceptions. In an unattended embedded system (think Mars Rover), the
>>>> top-level code might well be:
>>>>
>>>> while 1:
>>>>    try:
>>>>       main()
>>>>    except:
>>>>       reset()
>>> Do you really want to except SystemExit, KeyboardInterrupt, MemoryError
>>> and SyntaxError?
> 
> Absolutely.  Let's take my example -- you're writing software for a Mars 
> Rover.  I have no idea how you might get a MemoryError, but let's say you 
> do.  Which would you rather do, perform a system reset, or print a stack 
> trace and wait for a friendly Martian to come along and reboot you?
> 
> You may think I'm being silly, but I'm dead serious.  The many layers of 
> "It's impossible for this to happen, but if it does let's do something to 
> try and recover" processing saved that mission several times over.  In some 
> applications, there's no such thing as "halt".

Yeah, having your mars rower forever running in a loop to try to convert
some random string to a number is sure something you want to achieve.

Tino
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