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

Hrvoje Niksic hrvoje.niksic at avl.com
Wed Nov 10 13:23:35 CET 2010

On 11/10/2010 05:12 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

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?

I think he's referring to the choice of identifiers, and the usage examples given in the documentation and tutorials. For example, in the original PyGTK, all identifiers included "Gtk" in the name, so it made sense to write from pygtk import * so you could spell GtkWindow as GtkWindow rather than the redundant pygtk.GtkWindow. In that sense the module writer "expected" to be imported this way, although you are right that it doesn't the least bit matter for the correct operation of the module itself. For GTK 2 PyGTK switch to "gtk.Window", which effectively removes the temptation to import * from the module.

There are other examples of that school, most notably ctypes, but also Tkinter and the python2 threading module. Fortunately it has become much less popular in the last ~5 years of Python history.

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