This patch allows new-style exceptions and makes Exception a 
new-style class.

The test suite runs, apart from failures in test_tempfile (will dig, 
but doubt this is my fault) and test__locale (known OS X problem).

Logged In: YES 
user_id=329382

One thing: Raising an old-style class/instance doesn't give a traceback or 
populate sys.last_*.

Logged In: YES 
user_id=6656

You're right!  Odd.  No time to fix it today, I'm afraid.

Logged In: YES 
user_id=6656

New patch attached.  Did this a while ago, don't actually remember the 
details of what's new :-/

The problem with the previous patch was that one of my exception-
checking macros had the side-effect of clearing any pending exception...

Logged In: YES 
user_id=6656

I found the final wart (caught by test_tempfile of all things).  I think the 
attached is good to go.

Issues remaining: test_pickletools fails, because PickleError is now new-
style and thus pickles differently.  Docs.

Logged In: YES 
user_id=31435

FYI, there's nothing special about PicklingError in the 
pickletools doctest, it's just aiming at an example of an 
instance -- that it's also an exception instance is irrelevant 
to what the test is aiming at.

Tell you what:  I'll check in a suitable change to 
pickletools.py, so that the example it uses stops interfering 
with this patch.

Logged In: YES 
user_id=31435

FYI, there's nothing special about PicklingError in the 
pickletools doctest, it's just aiming at an example of an 
instance -- that it's also an exception instance is irrelevant 
to what the test is aiming at.

Tell you what:  I'll check in a suitable change to 
pickletools.py, so that the example it uses stops interfering 
with this patch.

Logged In: YES 
user_id=764593

Several lines near the end of errors.c had no visible 
change.  Was this a whitespace cleanup, or is this a risk of 
tab/space mixing?

Logged In: YES 
user_id=6656

Jim: Yes.  It looks like I ran delete-trailing-whitespace on the file at 
some point.  I could redo the diff without them, but it would be tedious...

Tim: thanks!

Logged In: YES 
user_id=764593

Is it worth adding a comment on parsing precedence?  

An object can be both an instance and a class, which puts 
some ambiguity between "raise class" and "raise 
classinstance".  

Assuming the class seems sensible; I'm just wondering 
whether it should be made explicit.  (Making something 
both an instance and a subclass of anything besides object 
might be weird enough that you don't *want* to document 
the results yet.)

Logged In: YES 
user_id=6656

> Is it worth adding a comment on parsing precedence?

I've been studiously avoiding thinking about that :)

> Making something both an instance and a subclass of
> anything besides object might be weird enough that you
> don't *want* to document the results yet.

Quite.  What happens, happens IMHO.  I'm prepared to be argued into a 
different position on this, but I do think the only reason someone would 
do this is curiousity :)

Logged In: YES 
user_id=6656

Here's a patch updated to SVN HEAD (the PEP 342 implementation meant this 
wasn't quite trivial).

Logged In: YES 
user_id=1038590

New patch worked fine on Ubuntu 5.10 (all tests in 'make
test' passed, aside from the skips due to the various
extension modules I can't build)

Logged In: YES 
user_id=99874

I haven't tried out the patch, I just want to chime in to
say how VERY much I would like to have this. I'm ready NOW
to completely give up using old-style classes, but because
of exceptions I'm not allowed to. This would fix that for
me. If Python had a "vote for your favorite bugs" list, I'd
be voting for this one.

Logged In: YES 
user_id=357491

Rev. 42711 has the patch with the requisite tweaks for it to
work for PEP 352.

Thanks, Michael!