I can't see all that much use for GeneratorExit in code that needs to be compatible with 2.4, since the rest of the machinery that makes exception handling around yield feasible doesn't exist.
I agree entirely - my goal is to make sure it stays that way.
The kind of code I'm talking about would be an *existing* Python 2.4 generator that happens to do something like:
def gen(tasks): """yield the results of a bunch of task functions""" for task in tasks: try: yield (task, task()) except Exception, ex: yield ExceptionOccurred(task, ex)
If you run such a generator on Python 2.5, but don't run it to completion before it is garbage collected, you will get an error message printed on stderr saying that an exception was ignored when this generator was cleaned up. If you use the new PEP 342 features to try to explicitly close it before it is garbage collected, you'll get the exception directly.
The culprit is the RuntimeError raised when the generator's close() method gets upset because the generator swallowed GeneratorExit.
If GeneratorExit inherits directly from BaseException, such unexpected behaviour won't happen - the only way for an existing generator to break is if it contained a bare except clause, and that code was *already* dubious (e.g. it probably swallowed KeyboardInterrupt).
I don't have any actual live examples of a generator with a broad exception clause like the one above, but toy generators like the one above are legal in 2.4 and result in spurious errors with current SVN.
I can't say that I care enough about this hypothetical inter-version flimflam to warrant mucking-up the otherwise useful distinction between Exception and BaseException. special-cases-aren't-special-enough ... Raymond