Raising objects

[Andrew Dalke]

Steven Taschuk:
> But is there a problem with being able to raise anything?  Perhaps
> some class of easy-to-produce bugs that I'm not seeing?

Here's my guess.  Currently to catch any exception you need to do

try:
   f()
except:
  ...look in sys.exc_info()...

Calling sys to do that is a bit of a wart, but it's the only
solution since current Python doesn't have a unified base
type.

However, if all exceptions were derived from Exception
then you could do

except Exception, e:
   ... use e ...

This cleans up the wart at the expense of not allowing
any old object to be thrown.

Will Python ever require that all classes be derived
from 'object'?  If so, then the generic "catch everything"
would be

except object, e:
   ... use e ...

But that won't happen soon.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com