On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 09:33:43PM -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote:
I'll just note that where the current status quo trips /me/ up most is when I accidentally have a local module with the same name as a global module, and then I write an import statement expecting to get the standard library module, but end up getting the local module.
That's why when I tend to think about this, I start wanting a way to spell "definitely give me the global one, no matter what". IOW, I feel like I want a way to bypass relative module lookups.
Alternatively, maybe what you want is a way to say "definitely give me the standard library one, no matter what", e.g. from stdlib import codecs This would allow other packages to have their own codecs module/package without worrying about confusing import errors. To make this backwards compatible, though, we'd probably need the equivalent of C++'s "using namespace" statement, with no declaration being equivalent to: using namespace stdlib Or perhaps more python-like: __import_base__ = 'stdlib' Python 3.0 might default to __import_base__ = '', to force people to be explicit. Actually, the proposed with statement could be used here, e.g. import stdlib with stdlib: from . import codecs, user, gc looks reasonably clear to me, and for long package paths, it could be very convenient: import zope.app.interfaces with zope.app.interfaces: from .location import ILocation from .foo import IFoo, IBar # etc -Andrew.