[Python-Dev] Relative vs. absolute imports (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Wed May 19 15:21:32 EDT 2004

At 08:53 PM 5/19/04 +0200, Bernhard Herzog wrote:

Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> writes:

>> > Because in the current situation the meaning of an import is >> > ambiguous. >> >> What exactly is ambiguous about it? > > Looking at "import foo" you can't tell whether there's a module foo > expected in the current package or in the top-level module namespace. Well, looking at "print foo" I can't tell whether its a local variable, a global variable or a builtin either. Nobody's going to suggest we should introduce special syntax to distinguish them, I hope. Module import isn't much different

Yes it is, actually. You can answer the "print foo" question simply by inspecting the code of the function that contains it. (And if it's not in a function, you know it's a global, unless it's never assigned, in which case it's a builtin.)

But the "import foo" question cannot be answered by referring to the source of the module in which it occurs.

Absolute imports have their own difficulties, too, btw, and relative imports don't add much complexity on top of that. I don't think the ambiguity, if you want to call it that, is enough of a problem to justify the incompatibility.

IIRC, nobody has suggested eliminating them prior to 3.0, which will have lots of other backward-incompatible changes anyway.

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list