[AstroPy] Draft specification for PyFITS functional interface

[Tom Loredo]

Hi folks-

> one
> of the things that makes Python so useful is its flexibility and *lack*
> of forced adherence to a particular programming style.  Complaints
> that it would be "polluting" the pyfits interface make no sense to me

I can't speak for the authors, so perhaps they'll speak for themselves
on this.

That said... if the split is made, are you really going to complain
about having to type:

  import qpyfits, pyfits

versus:

  import pyfits

(or the two "*" imports) on the occassions when you want both interfaces?

As a developer, I think the package idea makes sense, (1) to help
"compartmentalize" development (in that it reflects a logical division
between the OO stuff that does the work, and the functional stuff that
is only an interface to the OO stuff), and (2) to prevent *namespace*
pollution.  Especially interactively, I can be lazy:

  from pyfits import *

If I only use the OO stuff, why should I fill my namespace (esp. in a
module that might itself get imported elsewhere) with all the other
stuff?  If you believe that users who use the functional interface will
often want the OO stuff, we can simply arrange that the qpyfits (or
whatever) module import the OO stuff into its namespace, so if you do:

  from qpyfits import *

you have everything (I'm not advocating this necessarily, but
it could be a way to have and eat the cake).  Or we can define
pyfits this way, but have under it a separate oofits module that
we could import by itself (pyfits.oofits?) when we write a module
or script that just uses the OO stuff.  pyfits.py would just
"suck" the oofits stuff into its namespace (perhaps by judicious
use of __all__ within the various modules).

I don't know what the big deal is regarding this.  Any of the
possible choices will be easy to live with.  FITS stuff is
such a pain (perhaps not incredibly difficult, but definitely
no fun!) that I'm just grateful the PyFITS team is doing
*anything* that takes that load off my back!  Yea team!

Cheers,
Tom