Chris: Having a more generic name for import-from at the eval loop level on top of NoModuleFoundError is breaking the "practicality over purity" rule. ImportSearchFailed might be the closest we can come to a generic name for what occurred.

Serihy & Barry: no. We do that now and it's already a nasty little hack. It would be better to let people catch an exception signaling that an import didn't happen because some module is missing than require introspection on a caught ImportError to tell what is going on (there's a reason why Antoine went to all of that trouble to add new exceptions so we don't have to look at the errno attribute on OSError). Exceptions are structured to work off of inheritance hierarchies (says the man who co-wrote the PEP to make all PEPs inherit from BaseException).