On 2007-08-30, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> How could it not be an exception, in the plain English sense >> of the word? Most certainly you're asking for the index >> because you want to do something with the index. If the item >> is not found, you have no index, so that's a special case that >> must be handled separately. There is no logical difference >> between handling that special case in an except clause versus >> handling it with an if-branch. > > In my case of have done os.listdir() on two directories. I want > to see what files are in directory A that are not in directory > B.
In that case list.find would not be much of a win, but sets might be. not_in_both = list(set(os.listdir("A")) - set(os.listdir("B"))) > I have used exceptions in other languages and only do so on > logic that should never happen. In this case it is known that > some of the files will not be in both lists. I just want to > know which ones. "Exceptions" has become somewhat a misnomer. iterators are implemented using exceptions, and there's hardly anything more common in modern Python code. The hair shirts and thumb-screws necessary for using exceptions correctly in C++, aren't needed in Python. -- Neil Cerutti -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list