> I'm inclined not to attempt to fix this. The reason that we don't pull 'a.b' out of sys.modules at this point is that if later in the execution of a/b.py we get an exception, the import will be cancelled, and sys.modules['a.b'] will be *deleted*, and then the variable 'c' would have a reference to a half-loaded module.

I think this is solvable -- track and delete the references too.


It's your decision in the end, but I think it's not good to make the language inconsistent because of technical limitations -- the interface should be the primary source for decisions.