Nick Coghlan wrote:
I find the imports at the top of the file to be a nice catalog of external dependencies.
Not only is it useful for human readers, it's also useful for packaging tools such as py2exe that need to know which modules are being used. I experimented once with auto-importing in PyGUI, but in the end I dropped it, partly because of this consideration. There were other problems with it as well. I don't recall all the details, but I think one issue is that any errors resulting from an import triggered by an attribute access get masked and turned into an AttributeError, making them very confusing to diagnose. Also, importing requires acquisition of the import lock, which could cause problems in a multithreaded environment if it happens at unpredictable times. For these reasons I'm inclined to regard auto-importing as an anti-pattern -- it seems like it should be a good idea, but it leads to more problems than it solves. -- Greg _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
