Just to make sure I'm not missing something (I probably am), I still think the recommended catch-all except construct should become "except StandardError:" with KeyboardInterrupt migrated to inherit from Exception instead of StandardError.
I think I didn't pay attention when that was being discussed before. I definitely don't like to make "except:" mean anyting besides "catch *all* exceptions." There are too many different use cases to favor a specific non-obvious; for example, the runcode() method in class InteractiveInterpreter() in code.py needs to catch all exceptions including KeyboardInterrupt but excluding SystemExit. Also note that StopIteration and the warning categories don't derive from StandardError; but if any of these is accidentally raised, I'd want my "except:" clause to catch it! And, while sometimes it's confusing that SystemExit is caught by "except:", it's really hard to debug why your program exits without any warning or traceback when a rogue library function raises SystemExit. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)