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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Dec 17 19:20:07 EST 2003

> I think this addresses all the concerns I've seen brought up in this > thread so far

No, it doesn't address my concern that scan-upwards semantics should be the default, in the sense of being what should be used in the absence of a reason to do otherwise, and should therefore have the most straightforward syntax.

It doesn't address that becaseu I don't want that to be the default. I'm considering adding syntax for relative imports so that the default import syntax can be absolute only, rather than ambiguous. IMO scan-upwards as the default is worse than ambiguous.

Also, you don't seem to have anything for the explicitly-relative case, which might not be strictly necessary, but I think I'd feel more comfortable if it were available somehow.

That's why I originally proposed single, double, triple (etc.) leading dots.

Thinking about the doubleunderscore names, it might not be so bad if they were a bit shorter, e.g.

I really don't like using double-underscore names here unless it was for extremely uncommon cases.

There are two proposals that I can live with: my original proposal with the leading dots counting the number of levels up, or the triple-dot proposal with scan-up semantics. In both cases, the default semantics would switch to absolute for Python 3.0.

I cannot accept scan-up as default, and I don't think we can come up with two separate clearly distinguishable non-default syntaxes to separate scan-up and explicit relative semantics, so you have to pick one there.

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

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