Do you think about something along those lines?
```
phone = book.publisher.owner.phone except AttributeError: None
```
Yes, that seems reasonable.
I don't mind this syntax but it would have to be supported by static type checkers and IDEs. And currently something like this is not:
```
try:
phone = book.publisher.owner.phone
except AttributeError:
phone = None
```
mypy complains:
```
error: Item "None" of "Optional[Publisher]" has no attribute "owner"
```
That sounds like a feature request for mypy. Would creating a new operator make it easier to implement analysis of that situation would mypy? My guess is not. Checking the AST to see if there's a try/except AttributeError sounds comparable to checking for the use of a none-aware operator. I'm completely ignorant of how mypy does its analysis, so that's just a wild guess.
If PEP 505 is accepted, it would need support in the `operator` module. Might as well design that aspect of the implementation now.
I'm sorry but I don't know if I understand that sentence correctly. You mean we would have to add an "explicit" function that behaves like a maybe-dot operator? Is it actually a requirement when adding new operators?
The documentation of the `operator` module says, "The operator module exports a set of efficient functions corresponding to the intrinsic operators of Python." It feels like there's an implicit "all" in there. The table of correspondences looks exhaustive. I haven't noticed any exceptions.