[Python-Dev] Alternative imports (Re: Python 3 design principles)

Oren Tirosh wrote:

Writing programs that run on both 2.x and 3 may require ugly version-dependent tricks like:

try: compile except NameError: from sys import compile

Just had a weird thought. What if you could write from sys or __builtin__ import compile which would be equivalent to try: from sys import compile except ImportError: from __builtin__ import compile Greg