"Tim Peters" writes:

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Percolator has "from x import *" code. This is what is causing the exception.

Woo hoo! The traceback bamboozled me: it doesn't show any code from Percolator.py, just the import in EditorWindow.py. So I'll call *that* the bug <0.7 wink>.

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I think it has already been fixed in CVS though, so should work again.

Doesn't work for me. If someone does patch Percolator.py, though, it will just blow up again at

from IOBinding import IOBinding

. Guido was apparently fond of this trick.

I apologise if I'm explaining things people already know here, but I can explain the wierdo tracebacks. Try this:

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def f(): ... from string import * ... pass ... SyntaxError: 'from ... import *' may only occur in a module scope

you see? No traceback at all! This is a general feature of exceptions raised by the compiler (as opposed to the parser).

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21323124912094230491 OverflowError: integer literal too large

(also using some name other than "as" in an "import as" statement, invalid unicode \N{names}, various arglist nogos (eg. "def f(a=1,e):"), assigning to an expression, ... the list goes on & is getting longer). So what's happening is module A imports module B, which fails to copmile due to a non-module level "import *", but doesn't set up a traceback, so the traceback points at the import statement in module A. And as the exception message mentions import statements, everyone gets confused. The fix? Presumably rigging compile.c:com_error to set up tracebacks properly? It looks like it *tries* to, but I don't know this area of the code well enough to understand why it doesn't work. Anyone? Cheers, M. -- same software, different verbosity settings (this one goes to eleven) -- the effbot on the martellibot