On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 8:19 AM, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
I understand you are arguing that a try expression will lead to people just doing `something() except Exception: None` or whatever and that people will simply get lazy and not think about what they are doing with their exceptions.
Exactly.
Unfortunately they already are; that shipped sailed when we didn't eliminate bare except clauses in Python 3 (hopefully we can change that in Python 4).
We should have a page somewhere tracking a py4k "wishlist". :)
I personally don't think that making people type out a try statement is going to lead to that much thought compared to an expression. I'm willing to bet most IDEs have a code snippet for creating a try statement so people are already not using the extra typing of a full-blown statement with at least two clauses as a way to stop and think about what they are doing.
I'm totally fine restricting this proposal to not having any concept of exception catching or finally clause: it just replaces the simplest try/except clause possible (while requiring an exception be specified). That takes care of the common control flow use case of exceptions while requiring more thought for more complex cases.
+1 -eric