Michael J. Fromberger wrote: > While I'm mildly uncomfortable with the precedent that would be set by including the contents of "sys" as built-ins, I must confess my objections are primarily aesthetic: I don't want to see the built-in namespace any more cluttered than is necessary -- or at least, any more than it already is.
I agree with this sentiment, and I'll also additionally say that 'import sys' doesn't seem to be needed when writing sufficiently high-level code. My python mud client (forever in development, but the structure-code is mostly done) uses TKinter, Twisted, and glue code for just about everything. In currently 1,080 lines of Python code (reported by wc -l, so it includes a few blank lines) in 9 files, I needed "import sys" once. [1] After I import sys, I use it exactly once -- I check the platform so I can use the higher resolution time.clock on win32 [time.time on win32 (win2k) seems to have a resolution of 10ms, while on a 'nix I tested with time.time has at least ms resolution]. I'll probably use sys again somewhere to build an automagic version/platform string, but uses for it seem to be very limited. I also have 0 imports of 'os', and the only immediately useful case that comes to mind is implementation of a #dir scripting command -- providing a minimal shell functionality, and this is certainly not a core component of the program. In my opinion, using 'sys' and 'os' are extreme examples of "low-level" Python programming. This sort of thing is probably very useful for writing actual scripts that replace the sort of work done by shell scripts, but as programs get more complicated I think they'd be used (proportionally) less and less. I'm -0.9 on sys (really don't like the idea but it wouldn't be awful to see it included in __builtins__, provided it's namespaced appropriately) and -1 on os. [1] Actually, it's in there three times, but they're all in the same file -- I'd just left a legacy 'import sys' in a couple local scopes and forgot to remove them. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
