[Python-Dev] making the import machinery explicit

[Brett Cannon]

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 13:45, Philip Jenvey <pjenvey at underboss.org> wrote:

>
> On Apr 14, 2012, at 1:03 PM, Brett Cannon wrote:
>
> > And lastly, sticking None in sys.path_importer_cache would no longer
> mean "do the implicit thing" and instead would mean the same as
> NullImporter does now (which also means import can put None into
> sys.path_importer_cache instead of NullImporter): no finder is available
> for an entry on sys.path when None is found.
>
> Isn't it more explicit to cache the NullImporter instead of None?
>

I disagree. NullImporter is just another finder that just so happens to
always fail. None is explicitly not a finder and thus obviously not going
to do anything. Isn't it clearer to say ``sys.path_importer_cache[path] is
None`` than ``isinstance(sys.path_importer_cache[path],
imp.NullImporter)``? I mean we have None to represent something is nothing
which is exactly what I want to convey; None in sys.path_importer_cache
means there is no finder for that path.
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