Amaury, I don't see where imp.find_module() tries to do a compile()
(which would trigger the SyntaxError). Is that really the full traceback ?

Regarding the strategy of pydoc to try to list all modules: I don't
think that's such a good idea. It's likely to take a long time to
compile such a list on a moderately used Python system and can have lots
of unwanted side effects via import hooks.

Instead, pydoc should just say that a module was not specified and be
done with it.