I mainly did up this patch to see how hard it would be, and now it's turned out to be fairly simple, I'm curious as to whether it would actually be useful to people. At the point where a global/builtin name lookup is about to raise NameError, first try calling a Python function, along the same lines as __getattr__. If that function hasn't been defined, raise NameError as normal; but if it has, let it either raise NameError or return some object, which is then used as if the name had been bound to it. Patch is here: http://bugs.python.org/issue23126 The idea is to allow convenient interactive use; auto-importing modules is easy, and importing names from modules ("exp" --> math.exp) can be done easily enough too, given a list of modules to try. It's probably not a good idea to use this in application code, and I definitely wouldn't encourage it in library code, but it has its uses interactively. Thoughts? ChrisA