Why Use Exceptions?

In a nutshell, exceptions let us jump out of arbitrarily large chunks of a program. Consider the hypothetical pizza-making robot we discussed earlier in the book. Suppose we took the idea seriously and actually built such a machine. To make a pizza, our culinary automaton would need to execute a plan, which we would implement as a Python program: it would take an order, prepare the dough, add toppings, bake the pie, and so on.

Now, suppose that something goes very wrong during the “bake the pie” step. Perhaps the oven is broken, or perhaps our robot miscalculates its reach and spontaneously combusts. Clearly, we want to be able to jump to code that handles such states quickly. As we have no hope of finishing the pizza task in such unusual cases, we might as well abandon the entire plan.

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That’s exactly what exceptions let you do: you can jump to an exception handler in a single step, abandoning all function calls begun since the exception handler was entered. Code in the exception handler can then respond to the raised exception as appropriate (by calling the fire department, for instance!).

One way to think of an exception is as a sort of structured “super go to.” An exception handler (try statement) leaves a marker and executes some code. Somewhere further ahead in the program, an exception is raised that makes Python jump back to that marker, abandoning any active functions that were called after the marker was left. This protocol provides a coherent way to respond to unusual events. Moreover, because Python jumps to the handler statement immediately, your code is simpler—there is usually no need to check status codes after every call to a function that could possibly fail.