[Import-SIG] PEP 402 implementation

[P.J. Eby]

At 01:08 PM 7/20/2011 -0700, Brett Cannon wrote:
>Obviously feel free to ask me questions (publicly or privately) if 
>anything in the importlib code is an issue for you (I know its 
>structure for bootstrapping reasons is a bit odd).

While we're on the topic, I was just browsing through importlib 
(while doing my sketch on how to support the "no pure virtual 
imports" change to PEP 402; see 
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2011-July/112385.html ) 
and I noticed that there are a few places in the implementation where 
it makes assumptions about objects' boolean values.

For example, PathFinder's find_module treats an empty path the same 
as sys.path, and will also fail if for some reason the bool() of a 
PEP 302 finder or loader object is False.  Also, module_for_loader() 
will create a new module object, if you have a False module subclass 
in sys.modules.

Is there any particular reason for these digressions from strict PEP 
302?  I can understand, say, Jython and IronPython not wanting to 
generate object id's, but I was under the impression that those 
languages can do identity checks (especially against None) without 
running into the general problem of generating object IDs in the 
presence of garbage collection.

These distinctions could be more problematic than they appear, as 
it's possible to inadvertently make your loader or your module 
subclass capable of being False (for example, if you subclassed a 
sequence type or implemented a __len__), and this could lead to some 
very subtle bugs, albeit very rare ones as well.  ;-)