[Python-Dev] :: (original) (raw)

Paul Prescod paulp@ActiveState.com
Fri, 04 May 2001 17:03:05 -0700

I'll throw out a partially formed thought in case it is useful to anybody.

"::" might be useful to solve another problem I've been struggling with: how to have multiple package distributions share a namespace (xml::dom::minidom, xml::dom::4dom, xml::dom::corbadom).

"::" might mean, in general, that you are walking through abstract, potentially merged namespaces and not through concrete dictionary implementations. I think that Python's using the same syntax for package namespaces and attribute accesses might seem more elegant than it is in practice. Things that "seem like" they should work do not because packages are fundamentally different than attributes:

from xml import dom.minidom File "", line 1 from xml import dom.minidom ^ SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Why isn't this symmetric? I would like to use "." on either side of the import

import xml print xml.dom Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ? AttributeError: 'xml' module has no attribute 'dom' from xml.dom import minidom print xml.dom <module 'xml.dom' from 'c:\program files\python21\lib\xml\dom__init__.pyc'>

I find it a little bit weird that importing one module has the side effect of populating a package.

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