When interactively developing/debugging a program it'd
be nice if we could throw the user into the pdb prompt
straight from the exception handler.

Currently, pdb.pm() only works outside of the exception
handler, after "sys.last_traceback" has already been
set, which doesn't happen inside the "except:" clause.
The alternative is to use:

 try:
   something...
 except:
   import sys, pdb
   pdb.post_mortem(sys.exc_info()[2])

I propose, as a convenience to the programmer, that the
first parameter to pdb.post_mortem() be made optional,
defaulting to None. In this case, it'd automatically
use the value of sys.exc_info()[2] in place of it's
otherwise mandatory first parameter. The example above
would be reduced to:

 try:
   something...
 except:
   import pdb;pdb.post_mortem()

alternatively, we could make it so that if
"sys.last_traceback" is not set "pdb.pm()" would pick
up sys.exc_info()[2] instead...

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Why put this in pdb.post_mortem() if we can just put it in pdb.pm()?  
pdb.pm() seems to already be for this purpose (except it currently only 
works from the interactive interpreter as you mention).

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I don't have any particular reason to prefer post_mortem()
to pm().

The knowledgeable Python maintainers surely are better
equiped than I am to know if pm() looking beyond
sys.last_traceback is a worse break of assumptions than
post_mortem() having it's only parameter being optional or
the other way around :-)

If there's no objections, I'd make the traceback parameter optional in
the post_mortem method, making it default to sys.exc_info()[2].

Thanks!

Added this functionality in r61312.