Correct use of try,except and raise?

[Roy Smith]

In article <873amddh0n.fsf at benfinney.id.au>,
 Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam at benfinney.id.au> wrote:

> Which "original class" are you referring to? The one posted by the
> original poster of this thread had no "original list"; it gathered the
> positional arguments (using '*items') into an 'items' parameter, which
> *doesn't exist* until the function body executes.

Ah, I didn't notice that.