Saizan wrote: > BTW what would the benefit of the form "lazily import A, B"? If you > name the modules why not import them directly? Maybe you are not sure > you would need them, but I don't think that the overhead of importing > them should matter..
It's primarily useful for large packages. scipy used to have a mechanism of postponed imports because loading all of the extension modules in all of scipy's subpackages takes a fair bit of time. It especially hurts when you only wanted one. However, it is quite convenient to simply write "import scipy; scipy.linalg.eig(matrix)". Nonetheless, we removed that feature and stopped importing all of the subpackages because the postponed import mechanism interfered with a number of other things (namely, getting docstrings through IPython's ? operator and making py2exe apps that use scipy). Having a third-party library do the same thing makes interactive use nice without burdening scipy with the problems. So, "lazily import A" would make sense if A was a large package where all of the goodies are buried in A.C.D and A.E, A.X, A.Z, etc. You *do* know that you need A, but you may not know what you need underneath it. -- Robert Kern "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
