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

Drew Perttula drewp at bigasterisk.com
Fri Jan 4 07:51:00 CET 2008

Simon Percivall wrote:

Wouldn't a (stdlib) function suffice in the cases where this is needed?

ET = importwithalternative("xml.etree.CElementTree", "cElementTree", "elementtree.ElementTree") It's not as elegant, but it's easier than status quo.

I like that direction a lot better than the syntax proposals. This isn't the kind of thing that needs to get composed into bigger expressions, which is where clever uses of operators really shine. Here, I think the operators were subtracting clarity and your named function was adding clarity.

When I saw the OP, I actually wondered why people whose codebases are "filled" with the same try/except block over and over hadn't just written their own import_with_alternative function in the first place. If I wanted half my lines of code to be devoted to control flow and block structure, I'd write in one of those curly-brace languages :)

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