Another point where Python is really better than C is the issue of error handling. It is a fact of life that everything involving RPC may fail, for a variety of reasons outside the user's control: the network may be disconnected, the server may be down, etc. Clients must be prepared to handle such failures and recover from them, or at least print an error message and die. In C this means that every function returns an error status that must be checked by the caller, causing programs to be cluttered with error checks — or worse, programs that ignore errors and carry on working with garbage data.
In Python, errors are generally indicated by exceptions, which can be handled out of line from the main flow of control if necessary, and cause immediate program termination (with a stack trace) if ignored. To profit from this feature, all RPC errors that may be encountered by AIL-generated stubs in Python are turned into exceptions. An extra value passed together with the exception is used to relay the error code returned by the server to the handler. Since in general RPC failures are rare, Python test programs can usually ignore exceptions — making the program simpler — without the risk of occasional errors going undetected. (I still remember the embarrassment of a hundredfold speed improvement reported, long, long, ago, about a new version of a certain program, which later had to be attributed to a benchmark that silently dumped core...)