Manually raising (throwing) an exception in Python

Question

How can I raise an exception in Python so that it can later be caught via an except block?

Answer 1

For the common case where you need to throw an exception in response to some unexpected conditions, and that you never intend to catch, but simply to fail fast to enable you to debug from there if it ever happens — the most logical one seems to be AssertionError:

if 0 < distance <= RADIUS:
    #Do something.
elif RADIUS < distance:
    #Do something.
else:
    raise AssertionError("Unexpected value of 'distance'!", distance)