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Maintainability (was Re: Stackless & String-processing)

Fred L. Drake fdrake at cnri.reston.va.us
Fri Jul 23 10:35:55 EDT 1999 
Skip Montanaro wrote:
 > Some modules
 > in the standard distribution were designed specifically to support this
 > (types and Tkinter come to mind).

Greg Ewing writes:
 > In the case of Types, it could easily have been designed
 > differently. Writing Types.List would not be much harder than
 > typing Listtype and would be easier to read as well.

  I actually like the longer names on this one, but otherwise...

 > As for Tkinter, I've gotten into the habit of always
 > writing Tkinter.Button, etc. and I think the qualification

  Though I think some of my co-workers disagree, I agree with you on
this one.  Tkinter is a *terrible* module for the "import *" style.
James Henstridge's "gtk" module is much better about this, but enough
of the constants have short enough names that I won't use "import *".
  Another problem of "import *" is that it makes introspection of a
module (using dir(), idle, whatever) more painful.

 > So I wouldn't mind much if the * form of import
 > went away, either. You can easily write a function
 > which does the same thing if you really, really want it.

  Yes.
  Something that I'd like to see, that I don't think has been
mentioned for a long time, is some sort of "import ... as" statement.
I like qualifying the names from a module, but if I'm using them a lot 
I want to give the module a short name.  For instance,

	import Tkinter as Tk

would be more comfortable, and is much more clear than:

	import Tkinter
	_tk = Tkinter
	del Tkinter

  Variants could include:

	import package.module as pkgmod	# pkgmod is the actual 
					# module, not the package

	from package import module as pkgmod
				        # the same, possibly cleaner

	from module import function as func

  As I said, I haven't noticed this come up for a while, so maybe I'm
the only one, but I think this would encourage clarity and
"localizing" the names of imported modules (adding a leading _ so when
others "import *" from our modules their namespace isn't polluted too
much).


  -Fred

--
Fred L. Drake, Jr.	     <fdrake at acm.org>
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
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