wrote: > Coming from a background that exposed me to far too many languages, I > find the latter two examples (i.e. use try/except) to be horrible > solutions. It's not a matter of light/heavy weight, it's a matter of > using exceptions for normal loop flow control is a really bad idea. > 1) I think it's less clear why the loop works > 2) The possibility (in more complicated examples) that this could mask > a real exception (if for example, your function
I'm waiting for the end of that sentence... > > I recommend reading Effective Java (Bloch), specifically the beginning > of the exceptions chapter, for more details why using exceptions to > exit loops is a bad thing (and while the title is effective java, much > of it is directly applicable to a lot of python code) Can you paraphrase some of the arguments for those of us not fortunate enough to have a copy of the book? I've heard a lot of arguments against using exceptions, and most of those I have heard don't apply to Python. Like it or not, Python uses exceptions for normal loop flow control. That's a fact of life, live with it: every normal termination of a for loop is an exception. Real exceptions don't get masked: for loops terminate with StopIteration, and they only catch StopIteration, so any other exception is propagated. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
