[Python-ideas] Module aliases and/or "real names"

[Ron Adam]

On 01/04/2011 04:52 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> Hmm... I starred this and am finally dug out enough to comment.
>
> Would it be sufficient if the __module__ attribute of classes and
> functions got set to the "canonical" name rather than the "physical"
> name?
>
> You can currently get a crude version of this by simply assigning to
> __name__ at the top of the module.
>
> That sounds like it would be too confusing, however, so perhaps we
> could make it so that, when the __module__ attribute is initialized,
> it first looks for __canonical__ and then for __name__?
>
> This may still be too crude though -- I looked at the one example I
> could think of where this might be useful, the unittest package, and
> realized that it would set __module__ to 'unittest' even for classes
> that are not actually re-exported via the unittest namespace.
>
> So maybe it would be better in that case to just patch the __module__
> attribute of all the public classes in unittest/__import__.py?
>
> OTOH for things named __main__, setting __canonical__ (automatically,
> by -m or whatever other mechanism starts execution, like "python
> <filename>" might actually work.
>
> On the third hand, maybe you've finally hit upon a reason why the "if
> __name__ == '__main__': main()" idiom is bad...


(This is probably something that was suggested more than a few times before.)

Would it help if global name space acquired a __main__ name?  Then the 
standard if line becomes only a slightly different "if __name__ == 
__main__: main()".  I think that would make more sense to beginners also 
and it is a bit less magical.

For now, both ways could work, __main__ would be "__main__" or None, but 
down the road, (long enough to be sure everyone knows to drop the quotes), 
both __main__ and __name__ could be switched to the actual module name so 
that __name__ and __module__ attributes would always be correct.

Cheers,
    Ron