"JH" == Jeremy Hylton <jeremy@zope.com> writes:
JH> I'm not sure what the base class(es) actually buys us. We JH> could just as well say by fiat that the interpreter will set JH> the traceback attribute of an exception instance to the JH> traceback. Why do we need a special base class to accomplish JH> that? This is Python. You don't need to do isinstance(). JH> You just need to see if it has the right attributes. You might be right. It certainly hasn't hindered us up 'til now. JH> BTW, what is the signature for Exception.__init__()? I've JH> written many exception classes, often subclasses of some other JH> exception, but I've hardly ever paid attention to the JH> superclass __init__(). It usually suffices to set the right JH> attributes. When it was written in Python, I believe it was defined as class Exception: def __init__(self, *args): self.args = args and that's essentially what it is now that it's implemented in C. But many of the derived exception classes have their own funky __init__()s for backwards compatibility, e.g. EnvironmentError which looks at the number of arguments to decide which of the errno, strerror, and filename attributes to set. -Barry