[Python-Dev] Deprecating string exceptions

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "JH" == Jeremy Hylton <jeremy@zope.com> writes:

    JH> I'm not sure what the base class(es) actually buys us.  We
    JH> could just as well say by fiat that the interpreter will set
    JH> the traceback attribute of an exception instance to the
    JH> traceback.  Why do we need a special base class to accomplish
    JH> that?  This is Python.  You don't need to do isinstance().
    JH> You just need to see if it has the right attributes.

You might be right.  It certainly hasn't hindered us up 'til now.

    JH> BTW, what is the signature for Exception.__init__()?  I've
    JH> written many exception classes, often subclasses of some other
    JH> exception, but I've hardly ever paid attention to the
    JH> superclass __init__().  It usually suffices to set the right
    JH> attributes.

When it was written in Python, I believe it was defined as

class Exception:
    def __init__(self, *args):
	self.args = args

and that's essentially what it is now that it's implemented in C.  But
many of the derived exception classes have their own funky
__init__()s for backwards compatibility, e.g. EnvironmentError which
looks at the number of arguments to decide which of the errno,
strerror, and filename attributes to set.

-Barry