Picking up this thread as part of the PEP 562 and PEP 549 review. I like PEP 562 most, but I propose to add special-casing for `__dir__`. Not quite as proposed above (making the C level module_dir() look for `__all__`) but a bit more general -- making module_dir() look for `__dir__` and call that if present and callable. Ivan what do you think of that idea? It should be simple to add to your existing implementation. ( https://github.com/ilevkivskyi/cpython/pull/3#issuecomment-343591293) On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 1:26 AM, Ivan Levkivskyi <levkivskyi@gmail.com> wrote:
@Anthony
module.__getattr__ works pretty well for normal access, after being imported by another module, but it doesn't properly trigger loading by functions defined in the module's own namespace.
The idea of my PEP is to be very simple (both semantically and in terms of implementation). This is why I don't want to add any complex logic. People who will want to use __getattr__ for lazy loading still can do this by importing submodules.
@Nathaniel @INADA
The main two use cases I know of for this and PEP 549 are lazy imports of submodules, and deprecating attributes.
Yes, lazy loading seems to be a popular idea :-) I will add the simple recipe by Inada to the PEP since it will already work.
@Cody
I still think the better way to solve the custom dir() would be to change the module __dir__ method to check if __all__ is defined and use it to generate the result if it exists. This seems like a logical enhancement to me, and I'm planning on writing a patch to implement this. Whether it would be accepted is still an open issue though.
This seems a reasonable rule to me, I can also make this patch if you will not have time.
@Guido What do you think about the above idea?
-- Ivan
-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)