[Zope] Uninteligible error messages

[jamie at textmatters.com]

Quite often, the error messages from zope are not helpful (IMHO). For
example, does anyone know why doing this in a python script:

  script.manage_addProperty("test","null/null/null","date")

gives the error:
AttributeError: SyntaxError instance has no attribute 'replace'

But a differently-bad date, like this:

  script.manage_addProperty("test","null","date")

gives the error:
IndexError: string index out of range

Neither of which is particularly helpful at diagnosing the error. Why
can't it return something like "DateException could not convert string to
date"

Does this count as a bug that should go in collector?

Robert (Jamie) Munro