[Python-Dev] Major revision of PEP 348 committed

[Jack Diederich]

On Tue, Aug 09, 2005 at 12:28:08AM -0600, Steven Bethard wrote:
> Raymond Hettinger wrote:
> > If the PEP can't resist the urge to create new intermediate groupings,
> > then start by grepping through tons of Python code to find-out which
> > exceptions are typically caught on the same line.  That would be a
> > worthwhile empirical study and may lead to useful insights.
> 
> I was curious, so I did a little grepping (ok, os.walking and
> re.findalling) ;-) through the Python source.  The only exceptions
> that were caught together more than 5 times were:
> 
> AttributeError and TypeError (23 instances)
> ImportError and AttributeError (9 instances)
> OverflowError and ValueError (9 instances)
> IOError and OSError (6 instances)

I grepped my own source (ok, find, xargs, and grep'd ;) and here is
what I found.  40 KLOCs, it is a web app so I mainly catch multiple
exceptions when interpreting URLs and doing type convertions.  Unexpected
quacks from inside the app are allowed to rise to the top because at
that point all the input should be in a good state.

All of these arise because more than one operation is happening
in the try/except each of which could raise an exception (even if it
is a one-liner).

ValueError, TypeError (6 instances)
Around calls to int() like
  foo = int(cgi_dict.get('foo', None))

This is pretty domain specific, cgi variables are in a dict-alike object
that returns None for missing keys.  If it was a proper dict instead
this pairing would be (ValueError, KeyError).

The rest are a variation on the above where the result is used in the
same couple lines to do some kind of a lookup in a dict, list, or
namespace.
  client_id = int(cgi_dict.get('foo', None))
  client_name = names[client_id]

ValueError, TypeError, AttributeError (2 instances)
ValueError, TypeError, KeyError (3 instances)
ValueError, TypeError, IndexError (3 instances)

And finally this one because bsddb can say "Failed" in more than one way.

IOError, bsddb.error (2 incstances)
  btree = bsddb.btopen(self.filename, open_type)


-Jack