You're misunderstanding what a catch-all means. It means *any* type (of error) is reasonable. To put it mathematically, catch-all means union (of sets), but the Python doc means difference (of sets).
An assertion is slightly different. It can (in principle) be turned off and is just used for internal checking. While there is large overlap, it is not quite the same (e.g., if code is assuming a certain conjecture, it should not use assert to check validity of assumptions). Best, Travis On Friday, February 9, 2024 at 1:44:23 PM UTC+9 dmo...@deductivepress.ca wrote: > Description of RunTimeError from docs.python.org: "Raised when an error > is detected that doesn’t fall in any of the other categories. The > associated value is a string indicating what precisely went wrong." > > It is for exceptions that cannot be categorized, so I believe it is indeed > just a catch-all error (but must have a description), and there is no > expectation that such an error is particularly serious. (A situation where > "an assumption that I never expected to be violated fails" can raise > AssertionError.) > > On Thursday, February 8, 2024 at 10:14:33 PM UTC-5 David Roe wrote: > >> On Thu, Feb 8, 2024 at 8:18 PM 'Travis Scrimshaw' via sage-devel < >> sage-...@googlegroups.com> wrote: >> >>> For RuntimeError, I would make it sound like it tells you there is >>> serious error occurring as it doesn't fall into any other error categories. >>> This actually makes it the opposite of a catchall error. >>> >> >> The main scenario when I use a RuntimeError is when an assumption that I >> never expected to be violated fails. I agree with Travis that catchall is >> not the right description for this error type. >> David >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/9f55e934-d805-4153-9e4b-d633eacf975an%40googlegroups.com.
