[Python-Dev] Syntax suggestion for imports (original) (raw)

John Barham jbarham at gmail.com
Thu Jan 3 02:59:19 CET 2008

Raymond Hettinger wrote:

How about a new, simpler syntax:

* import threading or dummythreading as threading * import xml.etree.CElementTree or cElementTree or elementree.ElementTree as ET * from cStringIO or StringIO import StringIO

These all look good to me. The "short circuit" import syntax and semantics are compact and intuitive.

* import readline or emptymodule

This I find more problematic as "emptymodule" seems too magical. Even now any code that wants to use a module that might not have been successfully imported needs to check if that's the case. E.g., a fuller current use-case would be:

try: readline = None import readline except ImportError: pass

if readline is not None: readline.foo() ...

Conceivably emptymodule could act as a Null object but that could create more problems than it solves.

John

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