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How would you feel about an RFE proposing to add a default
SIGALRM handler that raises some new exception like
'AlarmInterrupt', analogous to KeyboardInterrupt that gets
raised if the user hits ^C.  I think that's more in the
Python spirit of maintaining a controlled environment where
at worst, if there's an unhandled exception, the interpreter
prints a stack trace and shuts down cleanly instead of just
blipping out of existence with i/o pending and whatnot. 
There might be some other signals that should also be caught
like that.  In fact KeyboardInterrupt, AlarmInterrupt, etc.
could all be subclasses of an Interrupt class of exceptions.