[PYTHON MATRIX-SIG] package, ni, and Numeric

[Jim Phillips]

Hi,

After Numeric's brief interlude with packages and ni, I have to agree that ni  
is not ready for prime time.  At the very least, packages should be a  
mandatory extension to the import methods, not an extra import that changes  
system functionality for everything.

Anyway, I now notice that Numeric is fundamentally incompatible with ni  
because it usually resides in a subdirectory of a valid path with the same  
name as the module.  Thus, when ni is imported, it attempts to import Numeric  
as a package and bombs on "from Numeric import *".  This is the kind of cross  
module incompatibility that is just plain bad.  See the dump below for a  
disturbing example.

An OK fix would probably be to revise ni to always attempt to import  
something as a module before importing it as a package, or at the very least  
to make sure the package directory isn't also part of the path.  The best  
solution would be to make the package status of a directory explicit by  
requiring a special extension, such as the usual .py (the interpreter can tell  
the difference between a directory and a file, right?).

As a workaround, one could change the Numeric directory name to numeric.

-Jim Phillips
 jim@ks.uiuc.edu

jim@paris(54) python
Python 1.4b3 (Tue Oct 22 1996)  [GCC NeXT DevKit-based CPP 3.1]
Copyright 1991-1996 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam
>>> import Matrix, ni
>>> ^D

jim@paris(55) python
Python 1.4b3 (Tue Oct 22 1996)  [GCC NeXT DevKit-based CPP 3.1]
Copyright 1991-1996 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam
>>> import ni, Matrix
Traceback (innermost last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
  File "/usr/local/shared/lib/python1.4/ni.py", line 302, in import_module
    m = self.get0(mname)
  File "/usr/local/shared/lib/python1.4/ni.py", line 344, in get0
    m = self.get(name)
  File "/usr/local/shared/lib/python1.4/ni.py", line 362, in get
    sys.modules[name] = m = self.loader.load_module(name, stuff)
  File "/usr/local/shared/lib/python1.4/ni.py", line 204, in load_module
    return ModuleLoader.load_module(self, name, stuff)
  File "/usr/local/shared/lib/python1.4/ihooks.py", line 259, in load_module
    return self.hooks.load_source(name, filename, file)
  File "/usr/local/shared/lib/python1.4/ihooks.py", line 170, in load_source
    return imp.load_source(name, filename, file)
  File "/usr/local/shared/lib/python1.4/Numeric/Matrix.py", line 2, in ?
    from Numeric import dot
  File "/usr/local/shared/lib/python1.4/ni.py", line 306, in import_module
    return self.finish(m, m, tail, fromlist)
  File "/usr/local/shared/lib/python1.4/ni.py", line 334, in finish
    self.get1(fname)
  File "/usr/local/shared/lib/python1.4/ni.py", line 340, in get1
    raise ImportError, "No module named %s" % name
ImportError: No module named Numeric.dot
>>> ^D

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