On Tue, 23 Dec 2003, Ken Manheimer wrote:
This flowed well in my head, and looks natural. However, the suggestion about '.' or '..' referring to the parent looks _ugly and unnatural_.
Let's say '.' was used to spell "parent module", and let's assume that the module 'a.b.c.d' wants to import 'a.b.e'. The absolute import would be spelled:
import a.b.e
... and the relative import would be spelled:
import .....e # .[parent].[parent].e
Yuck! (no offense :)
Truly, yuck. But in my model, the leading '.' dot, itself, stands for the containing package, and '..' stands for the containing package's package, and so forth:
import ..e # [parent-of-parent].e
I can't quite get used to the idea of '.' having two different meanings depending on how many '.'s are found next to each other in an import statement. I believe that the notation above _is_ concise, but _is not_ very intuitive ...
Even using the leading '.' syntax, it would be good to have a specific identifier for the containing package, realized in each module and respected as a special identifier by the package machinery. I like '__pkg__':
import __pkg__.sibling # == 'import .sibling'
and
import __pkg__.__pkg__.uncle # == 'import ..uncle' import __pkg__.__pkg__.uncle.cousin # == 'import ..uncle.cousin'
... while the notation here _is_ intuitive (to a python programmer), but _is not_ concise. I still favor this syntax to the former syntax. I like '__pkg__' better than my initial suggestion ('__parent__'). It's more aesthetically pleasing. :) -- Devin devin@whitebread.org http://www.whitebread.org/