Re Interest check in some delicious syntactic sugar for "except:pass"

[Benjamin Kaplan]

On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 6:47 AM, Oren Elrad <orenelrad at gmail.com> wrote:

> To all that responded, thanks for the prompt response folks, your
> criticisms are well taken. Coming from Cland, one is inculcated with
> the notion that if the programmer wants to shoot himself in the foot
> the language ought not to prevent that (or even should return him a
> loaded magnum with the safety off and the hair-trigger pulled). My
> apologies for not immediately grokking the cultural difference in
> pytown.
>
> With that said, let me at least offer a token defense of my position.
> By way of motivation, I wrote that email after copying/pasting the
> following a few times around a project until I wrote it into def
> SilentlyDelete() and its cousin SilentlyRmdir()
>
> """ code involving somefile """
> try:
> ........os.remove(somefile)
> except:
> .......pass     # The bloody search indexer has got the file and I
> can't delete it. Nothing to be done.
>
> Certainly the parade of horribles (bad files! corrupt data! syntax
> errors!) is a tad melodramatic. Either os.remove() succeeds or it
> doesn't and the execution path (in the estimation of this programmer,
> at least) is not at all impacted by whether it succeeds or fails. I
> know with certainty at compile time what exceptions might be raised
> and what the consequences of passing them are and there is no sense
> pestering the user or sweating over it. Nor can I see the logic, as
> was suggested, in writing "except OSError:" since (seems to me) mere
> surplusage -- it neither causes a semantic difference in the way the
> program runs nor provides anything useful to the reader.
>
>
What if the user presses Ctrl-C to try to quit the program? Your bare except
is catching the KeyboardInterrupts and ignoring them.
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