Thank you everyone for your comments. I wish to retract my idea due to some killer issues. First, if a module had platform dependencies in defining constants, my scheme would not be able to handle that. The idea fails because many common situations would not work. Python should work for all. Second, this scheme would require some sort of time stamping of files where constants were taken from in order to see if a re-compile is necessary. The time needed for time-stamp checks would likely be more than any time saved by using constant names. Now, back to the shadows. Thank you, James Harding