[Python-3000] PEP 3100 Comments

[Georg Brandl]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> Well, personally, I don't see the advantage. I don't see the point of
> having lots of different exception types that say "you made a
> programming error" in different ways, and I severely doubt the
> usefulness of being able to distinguish between those different
> failure modes at run time. Others do. I doubt that one side is able to
> convince the other side. So let's agree to disagree.

I could see an issue with something like this:

try:
    # do a call that can fail with TypeError under certain conditions
    do_call()
except TypeError:
    # assume that the call failed

If you now make an error in do_call(), e.g. calling a function with too
many arguments, your code always assumes that the call failed.
Sure, it should be caught by unit testing, but it needs debugging anyway.

Georg