[Python-Dev] Bare except clauses in PEP 348

Guido van Rossum gvanrossum at gmail.com
Thu Aug 25 17:10:52 CEST 2005

On 8/25/05, Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger at verizon.net> wrote:
> It's only an overstatement if Guido didn't mean what he said.  If bare
> except clauses are deprecated in 2.x, it WILL affect tons of existing
> code and invalidate a portion of almost all Python books.

Deprecation means your code will still work I hope every book that
documents "except:" also adds "but don't use this except under very
special circumstances".

I think you're overreacting (again), Raymond. 3.0 will be much more
successful if we can introduce many of its features into 2.x. Many of
those features are in fact improvements of the language even if they
break old code. We're trying to balance between breaking old code and
introducing new features; deprecation is the accepted way to do this.

Regarding the complaint that Python is changing too fast, that really
sounds like FUD to me. With a new release every 18 months Python is
about as stable as it gets barring dead languages. The PHP is in the
throws of the 4->5 conversion which breaks worse than Python 2->3 will
(Rasmus ia changing object assignment semantics from copying to
sharing).  Maybe they should be warned not to learn Perl because Larry
is deconstructing it all for Perl 6? :-)


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