[cmwise]

The exact question is "How is exception-handling using try/except similar to and different from handling exceptional cases using ordinary decisions structures (variations on if)?

I've been looking through my book and can't really find a concrete explanation... I know that with the try/except method, you can have multiple "else"s by using multiple "excepts." I'm just not really sure what the similarities or differences are but I'll keep looking. Thanks for your help

[KevinADC]

Chapter 7.6 summary

[Delta62]

Try / except is different form if / else because it deals directly with errors encountered in the program. Basically, you use it to catch errors in a program.
So if you had a list:

myList = [1,2,3,4,5]

and you perform an operation that may create an error, such as asking for the value stored at position 6 (which does not exist), you might use a try / except statement to deal with any errors. In this case, maybe something like:

myList = [1,2,3,4,5]
print myList
index = input("Enter the index you would like to see: ")
try:
	print myList[index]
except IndexError:
	print "You have entered an invalid index."

if /else just doesn't deal with errors, specifically.

[programble]

Try/Except is useful for catching errors that cannot be predicted, whereas If/Else needs to be a predictable error.