To all that responded, thanks for the prompt response folks, your criticisms are well taken. Coming from Cland, one is inculcated with the notion that if the programmer wants to shoot himself in the foot the language ought not to prevent that (or even should return him a loaded magnum with the safety off and the hair-trigger pulled). My apologies for not immediately grokking the cultural difference in pytown.
With that said, let me at least offer a token defense of my position. By way of motivation, I wrote that email after copying/pasting the following a few times around a project until I wrote it into def SilentlyDelete() and its cousin SilentlyRmdir() """ code involving somefile """ try: ........os.remove(somefile) except: .......pass # The bloody search indexer has got the file and I can't delete it. Nothing to be done. Certainly the parade of horribles (bad files! corrupt data! syntax errors!) is a tad melodramatic. Either os.remove() succeeds or it doesn't and the execution path (in the estimation of this programmer, at least) is not at all impacted by whether it succeeds or fails. I know with certainty at compile time what exceptions might be raised and what the consequences of passing them are and there is no sense pestering the user or sweating over it. Nor can I see the logic, as was suggested, in writing "except OSError:" since (seems to me) mere surplusage -- it neither causes a semantic difference in the way the program runs nor provides anything useful to the reader. Now, perhaps this is a special case that is not nearly special enough to warrant its own syntactic sugar, I granted that much, but >30,000 examples in Google Code cannot be considered to be a complete corner case either. Briefly skimming those results, most of them seem to be of this flavor, not the insane programmer that wants to write "silence: CommitDBChangesEmailWifeAndAdjustBankAccount()" nor novices that aren't aware of what they might be ignoring. At any rate (and since this is far more words than I had intended), I want to reiterate that the criticism is well-taken as a cultural matter. I just don't want everyone to think I'm bloody insane or that I'm not aware this is playing with fire. Maybe we can put it in module "YesImSureJustBloodyDoItAlreadyGoddamnit" and prints an ASCII skull and crossbones to the console when imported? :-P ~ Oren PS. I did like Dave's suggestions that one might want to write "silence Type1 Type2:" which I suppose goes a long way towards alleviating the concern that the programmer doesn't know what he's missing. Doesn't quite meet my desire (both syntaxes would be nice, of course) to avoid the verbiage involved with explaining to the compiler (or the next reader) something that it knows well enough by now (or ought to know, at least). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
