[kdmccormick]

That's all great in theory, but in practice, I see except clauses mostly used to handle particular exception classes that callees are known to throw.

[wvenable]

My applications have very few exception handlers and most don't do any "handling" at all except logging.

My most robust application is a desktop application with a single exception handler at the event loop that merely prints the exception message in an a message box. If you try and save a file to a bad network location or something, just click ok and try again.