Question

Could you please explain why does the followin function return “1” when there is an exception? What is the purpose of returning “1”?

def initialize():
    """
    Starting point for the program.
    """
    try:
        go = Car()
        print "Instance of Car created"
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        return 1

Answer 1

It’s a fairly common idiom in C to return a non-zero value in case of an error.

My hunch here is that the person who created this function was used to programming in C and unfamiliar with exception handling. It’s impossible to tell without a larger code sample, but if I’m right, then there is probably some sort of error handling present where this function is called in the case that this function returns 1, or a non-zero value.

If this is the case, a more proper way to use the exception would be to either use raise to pass the exception upward to be handled else where, or handle the exception right there in the function.