Closes #14306: clarify expensiveness of try-except and update code snippet

birkenfeld · birkenfeld · commit 12c3cd7c1f09 · 2012-03-17T16:58:05.000+01:00
diff --git a/Doc/faq/design.rst b/Doc/faq/design.rst
@@ -284,8 +284,9 @@ Similar methods exist for bytes and bytearray objects.
 How fast are exceptions?
 ------------------------
 
-A try/except block is extremely efficient.  Actually catching an exception is
-expensive.  In versions of Python prior to 2.0 it was common to use this idiom::
+A try/except block is extremely efficient if no exceptions are raised.  Actually
+catching an exception is expensive.  In versions of Python prior to 2.0 it was
+common to use this idiom::
 
    try:
        value = mydict[key]
@@ -296,11 +297,10 @@ expensive.  In versions of Python prior to 2.0 it was common to use this idiom::
 This only made sense when you expected the dict to have the key almost all the
 time.  If that wasn't the case, you coded it like this::
 
-   if mydict.has_key(key):
+   if key in mydict:
        value = mydict[key]
    else:
-       mydict[key] = getvalue(key)
-       value = mydict[key]
+       value = mydict[key] = getvalue(key)
 
 For this specific case, you could also use ``value = dict.setdefault(key,
 getvalue(key))``, but only if the ``getvalue()`` call is cheap enough because it
