Hey guys, don't give up your bare except clauses so easily. They are useful. And, if given the natural meaning of "catch everything" and put in a natural position at the end of a suite, their meaning is plain and obvious. Remember beauty counts. I don't think there would be similar temptation to eliminate a dangling else clause and replace it with "else Everything". Nor would a final default case in a switch statement benefit from being written as "default Everything".
The thought is that it is okay to have useful defaults. My whole issue was that the PEP was choosing the wrong default. If we leave it alone, all is well. An empty except will continue to mean "catch everything", it will always appear at the end, its meaning will be obvious, and existing working code won't break :-) On the occasions where you really intended to catch everything, do you really want to go on an editing binge just to uglify the code to something like: try: ... except SomeException: ... except BaseException: ... It is more beautiful and clear as: try: ... except SomeException: ... except: ... To me, the latter is more attractive and is more obviously a catchall, just like an else-clause or a default-statement. It is a strong visual cue that at least one of the except clauses will always be triggered. In contrast, the first example makes you think twice about whether the final case really does get everything (sometimes implicit IS better than explicit). Raymond _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com