On 27Dec2013 01:57, Amber Yust <amber.yust@gmail.com> wrote:
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 [...snip...]
The problem here is that the only reason to import as above is to have access to the name "foo". What is you contingency plan for the failed import? How does the code cope without "foo". I'd rather have an ImportError at start than an arbitrarily delayed and harder to diagnose NameError much later. Because of this, I'd argue you should almost always want the except: clause if this is realistic, because you need to have a plan for the case of failure. I agree the try/except is wordy and possibly ugly, but I think it is usually needed when a failed import is not to be fatal. Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson <cs@zip.com.au> Every particle continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line except insofar as it doesn't. - Sir Arther Eddington