On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 12:24 AM, spir <denis.spir@gmail.com> wrote:
After some more reflexion, I find this general pattern of "chained try" (new thread title) really meaningful and useful, but maybe too rare to deserve proper syntax. However, what is the proper way to express it using current Python features?
Clearly, a series of nested try/except (compare: a series of nested if/else if python had no elif) is not the right tool, in my view, because try/except is to be used whenever the except branch is rare (semantically and practically, because itis clstly). What else?
Try/elsetry would not need to trigger actual exceptions with full error objects, exception catching, and stack unwinding (the whole machinary), but only set a plain flag meaning "this branch fails to execute normally [1].
If you, instead of raising an exception, return None or that thing, then you can do things as so: return foo() or bar() or baz() This can't work if None is a reasonable value rather than just an error value (which is often why one switches to exceptions to begin with), but it works OK much of the time, and works OK all of the time in some other programming languages that are built around this idiom. -- Devin