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I'm not a fan of this for two reasons. First, consider this motivation from the PEP: > Requiring specific exception types makes the programmer’s intentions cl

by jmyeet 2y ago

I'm not a fan of this for two reasons. First, consider this motivation from the PEP: > Requiring specific exception types makes the programmer’s intentions clear and encourages thinking about what exceptions might occur. This reeks of the same rationale for checked exceptions in Java. That was a failed experiment. You can't force people to deal with exceptions. They end up just swallowing them instead. It's better to propagate an exception than do that almost all the time. Like will we see except: replaced with except object:? I don't even know if that's valid. It's never come up. Second, this would be a breaking change. I really feel like this is where Python 3 went off the rails. In the Python 2 days making breaking changes was essentially verboten. But ever since Python 3 decided breaking changes were OK< it's like there's little restraint now and minor releases seems to be far too comfortable with this.

paiute 2y ago
Exactly, python is not Java. I don’t want it to be. There are perfectly good cases to catch all exceptions like this.
- williamsmj 2y ago
  I'm weakly opposed to the PEP, but if your concern is that you're going to lose the ability to catch all exceptions in new code, then that's wrong as discussed in the Backwards Compatibility section, i.e. do "except BaseException".
Scubabear68 2y ago
You nailed it on both counts. Going back more than a quarter century ago (!), I was one of those zealots in favor of checked exceptions in Java. It took a good 15 years to finally conclude the “checked” part is more trouble than it’s worth. Given that there is inevitably a root context for any given language invocation (main() for a command li program, top of a thread for a multi threaded app, etc), unchecked exceptions and a top level handler have proven to be more than enough. I won’t comment on Python backwards compat, will just shake my head.

by jmyeet 2y ago

paiute 2y ago

Exactly, python is not Java. I don’t want it to be. There are perfectly good cases to catch all exceptions like this.

williamsmj 2y ago
I'm weakly opposed to the PEP, but if your concern is that you're going to lose the ability to catch all exceptions in new code, then that's wrong as discussed in the Backwards Compatibility section, i.e. do "except BaseException".

Scubabear68 2y ago

You nailed it on both counts. Going back more than a quarter century ago (!), I was one of those zealots in favor of checked exceptions in Java. It took a good 15 years to finally conclude the “checked” part is more trouble than it’s worth. Given that there is inevitably a root context for any given language invocation (main() for a command li program, top of a thread for a multi threaded app, etc), unchecked exceptions and a top level handler have proven to be more than enough. I won’t comment on Python backwards compat, will just shake my head.