"Terry Reedy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
> > "Colin J. Williams" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >> Rick Wotnaz wrote: >>> +1 here. As far as I'm concerned, both os and sys could be >>> special- cased that way. That said, I would guess the >>> likelihood of that happening is 0. >>> >> +1 for both. > > Some people might prefer that math be special cased. Or some > other module. A neutral criterion is needed. > Actually, I don't think it's beyond reason to suggest that any module included with the standard distribution be special-cased in this way. That is, a reference to xxx.func(), without a previous import of xxx *could* be resolvable automatically, at least for those modules that can be found in a standard location. Whether it's a good idea to do so is another question. Offhand, I am not sure why it would be an insanely poor idea. It would mean some funky namespace building and possibly redundant imports, I guess. I'll certainly defer to just about anybody else's opinion as to the difficulty and advisability, but I believe it would be possible to do. Note that I am not saying that a reference to, say, 'argv' should provoke an automatic import. I don't mean that some automatic search for a matching function name should be done through some undefined module chain. I'm talking only about qualified references, like os.path or sys.stderr. As it is, a NameError is generated if the proper import has not been done. At the point of that error, the module name is known. For the programmer to fix the situation, an import statement has to be added to the code and then the code must be rerun. I don't see why it would be impossible to make that happen automatically, provided the module to be imported was recognized (through some undefined magic). I'd think the module would have to be known, because trying to import a nonexistent module -- "import ssy", say (in the event of a typo for "sys") -- would fail, so there would have to be a way to avoid looping on the "ssy.func()" line. Is it worth adding that kind of complexity to execution of a Python program? Probably not. Is it even a good idea to try to make it happen automatically? Possibly not. For one thing, it wouldn't always be the right thing to do. A developer would most likely want to set up the imports properly, and to know when they were not correctly set up instead of having Python fix things quietly. There's a reason why Explicit is better than Implicit. But *could* it be done? I'd think so. -- rzed -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
