I've been monitoring all of this discussion about relative imports, and have my own humble idea about how to spell relative imports. The first part stems from Guido's idea about using a '.' at the beginning of a relative import. It seemed a bit weird at first, but I eventually became very comfortable with the idea after thinking about it in respect to absolute imports. I'll explain what I mean. If you currently want to import a module 'a.b.c.d', you write: import a.b.c.d Now, if you're in the module 'a.b', you could still write: import a.b.c.d ... but the 'a.b' part is redundant because you're already in the module 'a.b'. If you take away 'a.b', then you end up with: import .c.d 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 :) What's needed, I believe, is an identifier/keyword/symbol that spells 'parent' that isn't '.'. Assuming that symbol is represented by '[parent]', the above relative import would look like: import .[parent].[parent].e ... which is a hell lot more clear IMHO. My initial idea is to spell parent '__parent__', and to have '__parent__' be a module-level variable in each module that refers to the parent module (where a top-level module might have '__parent__' refer to itself, or to None). Continuing with the above example, the relative import would be spelled: import .__parent__.__parent__.e ... but I'm not completely convinced that there's not a better identifier/keyword/symbol that could be substituted for '[parent]'. If I'm completely off track, then tell me and I'll continue to lurk until I get a better feel for the happenings of python-dev. -- Devin devin@whitebread.org http://www.whitebread.org/