It's a fairly standard pattern to see things like this: try: import foo except ImportError: foo = None (and of course, variants with from...import et cetera). These can potentially add a lot of clutter to the imports section of a file, given that it requires 4 lines to do a conditional import. It seems like it'd be useful and clean to have a syntax that looked like this: maybe import foo from bar maybe import baz from qux maybe import quy as quz Where the behavior would essentially be as above - attempt to run the import normally, and in cases where the import fails, map the name to a value of None instead. Users who want a different behavior are still free to use the long-form syntax. A possibly variant might be to also only run the import if the name isn't already bound, so that you could do something like... from frobber_a maybe import frob as frobber from frobbler_b maybe import frobble as frobber from frobber_c maybe import frobit as frobber ...to potentially try different fallback options if the first choice for an interface provider isn't available.