Exceptions have somewhat of a bad reputation in serious programmingcircles. People feel that they are troublesome for various reasons,including that they are non-local gotos and they make it hard toguarantee that you really are cleaning up after problems. (You canfind posts about this at Joel on Software and in Raymond Chen's blog,among other places.)

I don't know about that, but I do know that exceptions are really goodfor casual programs, which is what I mostly write. Casual programs

Python likes to make programming efficient: that is, to make programsfast and easy to write, and eliminate the tedious drudgery. Prettymuch all dynamically typed languages do, since static typing is a lotof effort (except in languages with a lot of type inference, where itis only some effort).

After writing yesterday's entry ,it's struck me that exceptions are a form of efficientprogramming, because they let you aggregate error checking and errorhandling across a large block of code.

Without exceptions