On Apr 1, 2020, at 23:47, Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer <arj.python@gmail.com> wrote:
Let's say i have a package.
import package package <module 'package' from '<path>'>
would it be nice to be able to change the repr of the package to
package package something some message ....
I don’t think so. Objects in Python have a str for “human readers” and a repr that’s more useful for debugging. The repr is nearly always either an expression you can copy and paste to create an equivalent object, or something in angle brackets that crams in the type and other useful-for-debugging information. And it nearly always has no newlines (even a string with newlines or a tuple of strings with newlines or a file whose path has newlines, the newlines get escapes), so you can log messages with reprs and know you’ll get one message per line.in the log output. Why should modules break all of that, and be different from strings, tuples, functions, classes, etc.? The str, which you get from print(package), might be a different story. If there’s a representation of a module that’s more useful to end users than the repr, even if it’s not as good for debugging, the str should use that representation. But is there? What would the message be? How would the module specify it? And how it would be useful for the end user to see that message? There’s a third thing that all types have besides repr and str, the docstring, which you get from help(package). Unlike the repr and str, the docstring is generally a constant, so it has no way of including runtime information, but that’s usually not a problem, and I don’t think it is for your use here. And it seems like the docstring might already be what you want. If so, I think it’s perfect for help(package) but would be wrong for print(package). I may be misinterpreting something about the goals of your proposal. If so, I apologize—but it would really help if you give a real example: some known module, what message you think it should include in its repr, where you plan to print out that repr, how you’d like to specify it within the module source, etc.