[Python-ideas] "maybe import"?

[Andrew Barnert]

On Dec 27, 2013, at 1:34, Amber Yust <amber.yust at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri Dec 27 2013 at 12:33:11 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>> We shouldn't encourage optional dependencies. They often make code harder to reason about or harder to read.
> 
> Is there a better alternative for utilizing functionality that may vary in availability from platform to platform?

The only way to use this would be to then continually check "if foo:" all throughout your module, to use it if present and do something else if not. I suspect that is a bigger readability/comprehensibility problem than the extra lines of code up top.

And in many cases, once you reorganize your code to solve that problem, this one goes away as well.

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