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

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Fri Dec 19 23:13:15 EST 2003

On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 16:30, Jack Diederich wrote:

I'm at least a little confused with what people want, as far as I can tell import semantics have three things * what module to import * what name to give that import * where to look for it

The 'from' keyword seems to be getting overloaded to mean both what module and where to find it, which the 'stdlib' tries to resolve. Most of the discussion has been about how to improve 'where to look'

Very interesting observation.

I like syntax that reads most important left-to-right, so what about from MODULE import NAMES as RENAME searching HOW or import NAMES as RENAME from MODULE searching HOW

searching could be 'asbolute' 'relative' or any of the other suggested words. If you wanted to get fancy it could be a list, if it isn't a list people who truly care could cascade try/except on ImportError.

I want to think about that more, but at first glance, it has some appeal. Neat!

-Barry

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