Exceptions as a Control Structure

[Peter Hansen]

Olivier Parisy wrote:

> Peter Hansen wrote:
>> Exceptions are also used by some as a mechanism for
>> returning information from subroutines, though it's
>> very likely the information will still be considered
>> "exceptional" in some way (think of it as an out-of-band
>> mechanism for returning special info).
> 
> Do you have some example of this in the standard library ?

It's easy to check for yourself, you have the source. ;-)

I searched for "(Exception" in the lib/*.py files, since
this code is likely to occur when someone subclasses the
top-level exception class.

There's an example similar to what I was describing in
inspect.py, using an EndOfBlock exception.  The Queue
module has Full and Empty exceptions that are a good
example.  By far the most occurrences of custom
exceptions are to define specialized ones denoting
error conditions, however.  I suspect the usage I
described is more common outside the standard library,
in part because code where it would be useful is more
likely to occur in higher level code.

-Peter