[Python-Dev] import problems (original) (raw)

Hrvoje Niksic hrvoje.niksic at avl.com
Fri Nov 28 11:36:44 CET 2008

Mart Somermaa wrote:

I meant that you have to

import sys only to access sys.modules (i.e. importing sys may not be necessary otherwise).

I understand that, but I'm arguing that that's a non-problem. Importing sys is a regular thing in Python, not an exception. You need sys to get to sys.argv, sys.exit, sys.stdout, etc. -- it's not like sys is an infrequently used module. Since sys is always present, importing it is not an efficiency problem, either.

mod = import(modname, submodule=True) with

import sys import(modname) mod = sys.modules[modname]

"import sys" is normally located near the beginning of the file (and needed by other things), so the actual code snippet would really contain only those two lines, which don't strike me as bad. Ideally, import would simply return the "tail" imported module in the first place, but I don't think introducing a boolean keyword argument really improves the design.

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