Exception as the primary error handling mechanism?

[Martin v. Loewis]

> For my own interest, I want understand the run time behavior of python
> and what details causes it much slower. Although people choose python
> for its programming efficiency, but sometimes the runtime still
> matters. This is an important aspect of the language. I'm wondering
> this is not even documented.  Why everybody has to go to the source
> code to understand it?

There are two answers to this question:

a) Because the source is the most precise and most complete way of
documenting it. Any higher-level documentation would necessarily be
incomplete.
b) Because nobody has contributed documentation.

The two causes correlate: because writing documentation of VM
internals takes a lot of effort and is of questionable use, nobody
has written any.

> Are you sure that there is no document that describes how python is
> working internally (including exceptions)?

Such documents certainly exist, but not as part of the Python
distribution. See

http://wiki.python.org/moin/CPythonVmInternals

for one such document.

Regards,
Martin