Exception as the primary error handling mechanism?

[Terry Reedy]

On 1/6/2010 1:20 PM, Lie Ryan wrote:

> Python decided that the default behavior should be raising exception and
> sentinel have to use the dict.get() method. Simple and clear. The other
> possible behavior (i.e. slicing returns a sentinel while dict.get()
> raises an exception) is arguably just as simple and just as clear; but
> python doesn't do it that way. Why? Because it's part of what makes
> python Python[1].

The altermatives are not quite equivalent. The current way lets one 
specify the sentinel whereas the alternative does not. There is hardly 
any reason to specify the exception.

tjr