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

Toby Dickenson tdickenson at geminidataloggers.com
Fri Jan 4 11:27:04 CET 2008

Raymond Hettinger wrote:

[Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven]

On the Trac project using your grep gives me 203 lines, if we take ~2 lines for and after in consideration, it still means 203/5 ~= 40 occurences. Thanks. I'm more curious about the content of those lines. Does the proposed syntax help, does the need go away in Py3.0, what is the typical pattern?

I dont think I would use this based on a survey of 16 cases over 35k lines here.....

The proposed syntax could be easily used 11 times. 10 of those are the 'or None' variant and account for platform-specific modules. 2 of those currently issue a warning about the missing module in the exception branch, but I guess I could live without that.

Two other cases uses a different fallback value other than None; one a string literal, and the other 'object'.

The remaining three cases do not really fit the proposed syntax. They are currently in the form: try: import xxx except ImportError: recovery actions else: do something with xxx

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