If all you wanted was some grouping of exceptions why not something like...
soft_exception_list = [IndexError, TypeError] hard_exception_list = [ZeroDivision] try: do_something() except Exception, e: if e.__class__ in soft_exception_list: handle_soft_exception() elif e.__class__ in hard_exception_list: handle_hard_exception() else: raise NotImplementedError Granted you're most likely looking for something that does this constantly on every line of code though... -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list