Catching exceptions from Python 2.4 to 3.x

Fri Nov 16 22:12:30 EST 2012

Oh for the day I can drop support for Python 2.4 and 2.5... 
I have some code that needs to run in any version of Python from 2.4 
onwards. Yes, it must be a single code base.
I wish to catch an exception and bind the exception to a name.
In Python 2.6 onwards, I can do:
try:
 something()
except Exception as err:
 process(err)
But in 2.4 and 2.5 "as err" gives me a SyntaxError, and I have to write:
try:
 something()
except Exception, err:
 process(err)
Is there some other trick to grab the current exception from inside an 
except block?
-- 
Steven