[Python-Dev] Breaking undocumented API (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Wed Nov 10 05:12:09 CET 2010

Nick Coghlan writes:

Module writers who compound the error by expecting to be imported this way, thereby bogarting the global namespace for their own purposes, should be fish-slapped. ;)

Be prepared to fish-slap all of python-dev then - we use precisely this technique to support optional acceleration modules. The pure Python versions of pairs like profile/_profile and heapq/_heapq include a try/except block at the end that does the equivalent of:

try: from _accelerated import * # Allow accelerated overrides except ImportError: pass # Use pure Python versions

But these identifiers will appear at the module level, not global, no? Otherwise this technique couldn't be used. I don't really understand what Tres is talking about when he writes "modules that expect to be imported this way". The imported module shouldn't care, no? This is an issue for the importing code to deal with.

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