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Tue Aug 17 03:01:56 CEST 2004 · https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-August/047909.html

On Mon, Aug 16, 2004, James Y Knight wrote:
>
> The criteria for whether a given exception should go under "Exception" 
> or "FatalError" is whether users' code should generally catch the 
> exception. Thus, at least "SystemExit", "KeyboardInterrupt", and 
> "MemoryError" should go under "FatalError". Catching those is nearly 
> never what you wanted to do when you write "except Exception:". There's 
> likely more -- I have not gone through all the exceptions in Python to 
> classify them.
> 
> One issue is that creating a new category of Exceptions doesn't help 
> people who do "except:" instead of "except Exception:". It is unlikely 
> that person meant to catch things like MemoryError, rather, they were 
> just being lazy. I suppose that syntax could be deprecated, at least in 
> example code and documentation, in favor of "except Exception" for the 
> usual case, and "except Raisable" for the cases where you do actually 
> want to catch everything*.

We've already got StandardError; I think it makes more sense to
rearrange the exception hierarchy a bit to support your suggestion
rather than creating a whole new base class.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"To me vi is Zen.  To use vi is to practice zen.  Every command is a
koan.  Profound to the user, unintelligible to the uninitiated.  You
discover truth everytime you use it."  --reddy at lion.austin.ibm.com

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[Python-Dev] Exception hierarchy [was Re: Another test_compiler mystery]