[GvR] > I wonder if your perceived need for this isn't skewed by your > working within the core?
The need was perceived by a colleague who does not work on the core. My own skew was in the opposite direction -- I've seen the pattern so often that I'm oblivious to it. Before posting, I ran some scans of our code base at work and found plenty of examples (mostly third-party cmodules vs python equivalents and a few that searched for similar functionality in different packages). It might be helpful if others were to also search their own code bases and post their findings: find . -name "*py" | xargs grep -C2 ImportError *py Also, Google's codesearch gives some examples (and a lot of cases that really do need the try/except form): http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=+lang:python+%22except+ImportError%22 I was surprised to see many examples in the form of: try: import xyz except ImportError: xyz = None I was also surprised to find plenty of code that is likely to be buggy because the two alternative loaded different names: try: from Products.OpenPT.OpenPTFile import OpenPTFile as ptFile except ImportError: from Products.PageTemplates.PageTemplateFile import PageTemplateFile I was not surprised to see searches for similar functionality across different packages like kjbuckets vs kjbuckets0 , Zope vs Zope2, or HTMLParser vs SGMLParser, or attempts to load any of several packages compliant with the DBAPI. Surely, Py3.0's automatic vectoring to C equivalent modules will help with the cases like cStringIO, cPickle. I don't think it will help with the general case of searching for a best available package (like gdbm vs dbm vs dumbdbm or threading vs dummythreading) or a best available implementation of a single function (like twisted.protocols._c_urlarg.unquote vs urllib.unquote or one of the various implementations of date utilities or encryption functions). Am curious to see what everyone else finds in their own code searches. [John Barham] > This I find more problematic as "emptymodule" seems too magical. > . . . > try: > readline = None > import readline > except ImportError: > pass Perhaps "import readline or None" would have been a better way to capture that pattern as well as the "except pass" pattern. Raymond _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
