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On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 4:08 PM, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 15:31, Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> wrote:

For top-level imports, unless \*all\* are made lazy, then there \*must\* be some indication in the code of whether to make it lazy or not.

Not true; importlib would make it dead-simple to whitelist what modules to make lazy (e.g. your app code lazy but all stdlib stuff not, etc.).

There's actually only a few things stopping all imports from being lazy. �"from x import y" immediately de-lazies them, after all. �;-)

The main two reasons you wouldn't want imports to \*always\* be lazy are:

1\. Changing sys.path or other parameters between the import statement and the actual import

2\. ImportErrors are likewise deferred until point-of-use, so conditional importing with try/except would break.