those darn exceptions

[Gregory Ewing]

Chris Torek wrote:

> Oops!  It turns out that os.kill() can raise OverflowError (at
> least in this version of Python, not sure what Python 3.x does).

Seems to me that if this happens it indicates a bug in
your code. It only makes sense to pass kill() something
that you know to be the pid of an existing process,
presumably one returned by some other system call.

So if kill() raises OverflowError, you *don't* want
to catch and ignore it. You want to find out about it,
just as much as you want to find out about a TypeError,
so you can track down the cause and fix it.

Generally I think some people worry far too much about
anticipating and catching exceptions. Don't do that,
just let them happen. If you come across a *specific*
exception that it makes sense to catch, then catch
just that particular one. Let *everything* else propagate.

-- 
Greg