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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Sat Nov 29 04:15:18 CET 2008

On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 6:56 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

Should this be reported as a documentation bug? Given the new import hooks, would it be fair to say that the main reason for import is to use it to import a module whose name is only known at runtime? Only known at runtime, and for some reason you want an actual module object rather than just the module's global namespace (since you can use runpy.runmodule() if you only need the latter). At the very least, the import docs should probably be updated to point to runmodule() as an alternative approach, so a doc issue is probably a good idea.

This sounds wrong to me. run_module() runs the module each time it is called. import has all the semantics of the import statement (by definition -- it is almost a tautology :-) in that it first tries to see if the module is already imported. Pointing to run_module() as an alternative just perpetuates the misunderstanding (alas fairly common amongst casual users) about what exactly import does.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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