These two comments together make a lot of sense. When your try block is a single lookup, you might as well use an if statement or get. However, when the 'abso

These two comments together make a lot of sense. When your try block is a single lookup, you might as well use an if statement or get. However, when the 'absolute minimum' is nontrivial try/except is still a good option, e.g. try: name = employee['name'] first_name = name['first_name'] last_name = name['last_name'] except KeyError: print "Bad employee data" return