How Best to Coerce Python Objects to Integers?

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 8:41 AM,  <breamoreboy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all, I'd suggest that this http://blog.pyspoken.com/2017/01/02/how-best-to
-coerce-python-objects-to-integers/ is not one of the greatest articles ever
written about Python exception handling.  Other opinions are welcome.
>

"""
So there you have it. Iâ Öm happy with this function. It feels bulletproof. It 
contains a naked except, but that only covers one simple line of code thatâ Ös 
unlikely to hide anything nasty. """

Yep! It's perfect. He has successfully made a function that won't leak any 
exceptions. Congratulations!

The novice believes that the first priority is to stop the program from 
crashing. The expert understands that crashing (especially with an exception, 
but even a segfault) is actually very helpful and useful.

I love the logic that a bare 'except' is okay as long as it's only covering one 
single line of code. There's almost enough truth in that to be meaningful, 
while still completely missing the point that a NameError is almost certainly a 
bug no matter where it crops up.

ChrisA