So Terry's right that in my haste to write down the idea I contradicted myself. I do want to tweak the APIs in the traceback module to accept only an exception. The question is whether we need entirely new functions or if the pre-existing ones can be updated to work with just an exception.

And if we were to tweak the existing functions instead of add new ones, I would do it by making all arguments optional and adding a new keyword-only argument called `exc` that took the exception. Either `exc` would be set or the old arguments would need to all be set, and it would be an error to set both sets of arguments. And when the old arguments were taken away then all arguments for those functions would become keyword-only.