[Python-Dev] capability-mediated modules (was: python-dev Summary for 2003-03-01 through 2003-03-15) (original) (raw)

Ben Laurie ben@algroup.co.uk
Thu, 20 Mar 2003 10:33:26 +0000

Greg Ewing wrote:

Zooko <zooko@zooko.com>:

Now what I would like is that instead of doing "import os" to load code, instead the caller provides, or doesn't provide the os module as part of the construction/invocation of A. I don't have a clear idea yet of how that could be implemented in a Pythonic, compatible way. Maybe, instead of there being one ultra-global namespace for importing modules from, it should be part of a function's environment. By default a function invocation would inherit the "import environment" of it's caller, but the caller could override this to provide a more restricted environment.

Inheriting things is not the capability way. Passing capabilities that allow imports is, of course, but isn't very Pythonic. I'm not sure there's a neat way to fix this that keeps both camps happy.

This would be equivalent to passing in a set of allowable modules as an implicit parameter to every call.

Making it explicit would make me happy. Can you pass parameters to an import?

Cheers,

Ben.

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