On 8/3/05, Guido van Rossum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [Guido van Rossum] > > > 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. > > [James Y Knight] > > 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. > > This is actually a good point, and what I was thinking when I first > responded to Brett. > > Sorry for the waivering -- being at OSCON always is a serious attack > on my system. >
As long as you don't change your mind again on bare 'except's I won't feel like strangling you. =) > I'm still searching for a solution that lets us call everything in the > hierarchy "exception" and *yet* has Exception at the mid-point in that > hierarchy where Brett has StandardException. The problem with Raisable > is that it doesn't contain the word exception; perhaps we can call it > BaseException? We've got a few more things called base-such-and-such, > e.g. basestring (not that I like that one all that much). > BaseException is what comes to mind initially. You also mention RootException below. PureException seems too cutesy. SuperclassException might work. SuperException doesn't sound right. Co-worker suggested UhOh, but I don't think that will work either. =) > BTW I just noticed UserException -- shouldn't this be UserError? > Yep, and I already changed it in my personal copy. > Also... We should have a guideline for when to use "...Exception" and > when to use "...Error". Maybe we can use ...Exception for the first > two levels of the hierarchy, ...Error for errors, and other endings > for things that aren't errors (like SystemExit)? Then the top of the > tree would look like this: > That makes the most sense. Error for actual errors, exception when another suffix (e.g., Exit, Iteration) does not fit. > BaseException (or RootException?) > +-- CriticalException > +-- ControlFlowException > +-- Exception > +-- (all regular exceptions start here) > +-- Warning > > All common errors and warnings derive from Exception; bare 'except:' > would be the same as 'except Exception:'. (I like that particularly > because I've been writing that in lots of code already. :-) > > A refinement might be to introduce something called Error, which would > change the last part of the avove hierarchy as follows: > > (first three lines same as above) > +-- Exception > +-- Error > +-- (all regular ...Error exceptions start here) > +-- Warning > +-- (all warnings start here) > > This has a nice symmetry between Error and Warning. > > Downside is that this "breaks" all user code that currently tries to > be correct by declaring exceptions as deriving from Exception, which > is pretty common; they would have to derive from Error to be > politically correct. > > I don't immediately see what's best -- maybe Exception and Error > should be two names for the same object??? But that's ugly too as a > long-term solution. Yuck. I say introduce Error (or StandardError or BaseError) and just live with the fact that older code will not necessarily follow the proper naming scheme. We can provide a script that will change source directly for any class that inherits from Exception to some other class, namely Error. -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
