I think the point was (and I'm extrapolating here) that `except:` exists at all, and doesn't require any special foresight to use. That compared to Rust, which thinks about safety first.

Or so it seemed to me.

"except Exception:" is rarely what you want IMO. It also catches SyntaxError, which is almost always a design error -- one you'd typically prefer would halt the system.

Unfortunately there's no common parent to EnvironmentError/SystemError/RuntimeError/etc that excludes SyntaxError.

I can't seem to repro that, SyntaxError seems to happen before the code runs the first time. (2.7 Ubuntu)

SyntaxError can happen as a consequence of loading a module (hitting an import statement, etc). But for a simpler example, replace SyntaxError with NameError and it's still almost always a design error that you probably have no sane way to handle in an exception handler (other than to mask the problem).

Python's a very dynamic language and so of course you could come up with examples to the contrary (ones where the user input could trigger SyntaxError or NameError).

But the only universally good reason I know of where you should be wrapping imports in try except is 2/3 compatibility or other module/library import fallback. For these you need to be catching syntaxerror and other system errors.