“Ask forgiveness not permission” - explain

Question

I\'m not asking for personal \"religious\" opinions about this philosophy, rather something a bit more technical.

I understand this phrase is one of several litmus t

Answer 1

You're right -- the purpose of try and except are not to cover your sloppy coding. That just leads to more sloppy coding.

Exception handling should be used to handle exceptional circumstances (sloppy coding is not an exceptional circumstance). However, often, it is easy to predict which exceptional circumstances might happen. (e.g. a your program accepts user input and uses that to access a dictionary, but the user's input wasn't a key in the dictionary ...)