[Python-Dev] If you shadow a module in the standard library that IDLE depends on, bad things happen (original) (raw)

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Thu Oct 29 13:20:31 EDT 2015

On Thu, 29 Oct 2015 at 09:00 Laura Creighton <lac at openend.se> wrote:

see the following: lac at smartwheels:~/junk$ echo "print ('hello there')" >string.py lac at smartwheels:~/junk$ idle-python3.5 hello there Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in File "/usr/lib/python3.5/idlelib/run.py", line 10, in from idlelib import CallTips File "/usr/lib/python3.5/idlelib/CallTips.py", line 16, in from idlelib.HyperParser import HyperParser File "/usr/lib/python3.5/idlelib/HyperParser.py", line 14, in ASCIIIDCHARS = frozenset(string.asciiletters + string.digits + "") AttributeError: module 'string' has no attribute 'asciiletters' IDLE then produces a popup that says: IDLE's subprocess didn't make connection. Either IDLE can't stat a subprocess por personal firewall software is blocking the connection. -------- I think that life would be a whole lot easier for people if instead we got a message: Warning: local file /u/lac/junk/string.py shadows module named string in the Standard Library I think that it is python exec that would have to do this -- though of course the popup could also warn about shadowing in general, instead of sending people on wild goose chases over their firewalls. Would this be hard to do?

It would require a custom importer or overriding import but it's doable. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20151029/bf853b22/attachment.html>

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