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

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Thu Nov 11 23:15:36 CET 2010

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 4:16 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:

Another couple of objections to getting rid of all:

If you're proxying modules or built-ins, you may not be able to use a private name, but you may not want import * to pick up your proxies. I find it annoying to see this: import module as module module.func() (instead of import module and merely leaving module out of all)

That gets us back to dir() and help() giving the wrong impression of the module's public API though.

The issue I have is that the current policy (public APIs may or may not be in all, private APIs may or may not be prefixed by a leading underscore) makes it impossible to reliably extract a module's public API programmatically.

If we instead adopt the explicit policy that private APIs are:

Then we get the 3 API tiers you describe: core public API in all, other public functions and globals without leading underscores, private API with leading underscores (or imported modules).

We could even add two additional functions to the inspect module (e.g. getpublicnames() and getimportstarnames()) which applied the relevant filtering rules.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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