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Why does list.index throw an exception, instead of using an arbitrary value (for example, -1)? What's the idea behind this?
To me it looks cleaner to deal with special values, rather than exceptions.
EDIT: I didn't realize -1 is a potentially valid value. Nevertheless, why not something else? How about a value of None?
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The index() method searches for the first occurrence of the given item and returns its index. If specified item is not found, it raises 'ValueError' exception. The optional arguments start and end limit the search to a particular subsequence of the list.
index() function The index() method returns the index of a substring or char inside the string (if found). If the substring or char is not found, it raises an exception.
Because -1 is itself a valid index. It could use a different value, such as None, but that wouldn't be useful, which -1 can be in other situations (thus str.find()), and would amount simply to error-checking, which is exactly what exceptions are for.
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