[Tutor] Catching different exceptions [Exceptions]

[Danny Yoo]

On Tue, 12 Feb 2002, Danny Yoo wrote:

> Not that this isn't bad --- it's just that we often want to be able to
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> look at the errors in more detail.


Gaaah!  Holy moley, that was bad phrasing!  I meant to say:

    "Not that this is bad..."

I think that having catchall exception handling is ok, as long as we
somehow send the user a good error message that can help us debug
things.  That is, as long as we have something like:

###
try: ...
except Exception, e:
    print "Something is wrong: take a look: %s" % e
###

is much better than:

###
try: ...
except Exception, e: pass
###

because the second doesn't even clue us into potential problems.



We had a discussion on catchall exceptions a few weeks ago, and I had
initially said that doing a catchall was evidence of lazy programming.  
Alan Gauld explained that using such a catchall can be a good thing, and
gave good reasons for using it.  After thinking about it for a while, I'm
leaning toward Alan's reasoning.