On 8/3/05, James Y Knight <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Aug 3, 2005, at 3:00 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote: > > [...brain hums...] > > > > OK, I'm changing my mind again about the names again. > > > > Exception as the root and StandardError can stay; the only new > > proposal would then be to make bare 'except:' call StandardError. > > I don't see how that can work. Any solution that is expected to > result in a usable hierarchy this century must preserve "Exception" > as the object that user exceptions should derive from (and therefore > that users should generally catch, as well). There is way too much > momentum behind that to change it. >
Oh, I bet Guido can make them change. =) Look at it this way; going with the Raisable/Exception change and having bare 'except's catch Exception will still lead to a semantic change since CriticalError and ControlFlowException will not be caught. Breakage is going to happen, so why not just do a more thorough change that leads to more breakage? Obviously you are saying to minimize it while Guido is saying to go for a more thorough change. So how much more code is going to crap out with this change? Everything under our control will be fine since we can change it. User-defined exceptions might need to be changed if they inherit directly from Exception instead of StandardError, which is probably the common case, but changing a superclass is not hard. That kind of breakage is not bad since you can easily systematically change superclasses of exceptions from Exception to StandardError without much effort thanks to regexes. I honestly think the requirement of inheriting from a specific superclass will lead to more breakage since you can't grep for exceptions that don't at least inherit from *some* exception universally. -Brett _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
