Summary
In this chapter, we’ve learned about exceptions—both how
to catch them with try
statements and how to
trigger them with raise
statements. Exceptions are
identified by string objects or class objects; built-in exceptions
are predefined class objects in Python 1.5, but user-defined
exceptions may be strings or classes. Either way, exceptions let us
jump around programs arbitrarily, and provide a coherent way of
dealing with errors and other unusual events. Along the way, we
studied common exception idioms, touched on error handling in
general, and saw a variety of ways to catch and match raised
exceptions.
This chapter concludes our look at the core Python programming language. If you’ve gotten this far, you can consider yourself an official Python programmer; you’ve already seen just about everything there is to see in regards to the language itself. In this part of the book, we studied built-in types, statements, and exceptions, as well as tools used to build-up larger program units—functions, modules, and classes. In general, Python provides a hierarchy of tool sets:
- Built-ins
Built-in types like strings, lists, and dictionaries make it easy to write simple programs fast.
- Python extensions
For more demanding tasks, we can extend Python in Python, by writing our own functions, modules, and classes.
- C extensions
Although we don’t cover them in this book, Python can also be extended with modules written in C or C++.
Because Python layers its tool sets, we can decide how complicated ...
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