[Python-ideas] Add __main__ for uuid, random and urandom

[Koos Zevenhoven]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 10:12 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18 April 2016 at 05:28, Koos Zevenhoven <k7hoven at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> So here's oneline.py:
>>
>> https://gist.github.com/k7hoven/21c5532ce19b306b08bb4e82cfe5a609
>>
>
> Neat, although you'll want to use importlib.import_module() rather than
> calling __import__ directly (the latter won't behave the way you want when
> importing submodules, as it returns the top level module for the import
> statement to bind in the current namespace, rather than the imported
> submodule)
>

Thanks :). That is in fact why I had worked around it by grabbing
sys.modules[name] instead. Good to know import_module() already does
the right thing. I now changed the code to use import_module, assuming
that is the preferred way today. However, to prevent infinite
recursion when importing submodules, I now do a setattr(parentmodule,
submodulename, None) before the import (and delattr if the import
fails).

>>
>> I suppose this could be on pypi, and one could do things like
>>
>>     oneline.py "random.randint(0,10)"
>>
>> or
>>
>>     python -m oneline "random.randint(0,10)"
>>
>> Any thoughts?
>
>
> There are certainly plenty of opportunities to make Python easier to invoke
> for one-off commands. Another interesting example is pyp:
> https://code.google.com/archive/p/pyp/wikis/pyp_manual.wiki

This is nice, although solves a different problem.

> A completely undocumented hack I put together while playing one day was a
> utility to do json -> json transformations via command line pipes:
> https://bitbucket.org/ncoghlan/misc/src/default/pycall

So it looks like it would work like this:

cat input.json | pycall "my.transformation.function" > output.json

Also a different problem, but cool.

> The challenge with these kinds of things is getting them from "Hey, look at
> this cool thing you can do" to "This will materially improve your day-to-day
> programming experience". The former can still be fun to work on as a hobby,
> but it's the latter that people need to get over the initial adoption
> barrier.

I think the users of oneline.py could be people that now write lots of
bash scripts and work on the command line. So whenever someone asks a
question somewhere about how to do X on the linux command line, we
might have the answer: """

Q: On the linux commandline, how do I get only the filename from a
full path that is in $FILEPATH

A: Python has this. You can use the tools in os.path:

Filename:
$ oneline.py "os.path.basename('$FILEPATH')"

Path to directory:
$ oneline.py "os.path.dirname('$FILEPATH')"
"""

This might be more appealing than python -c. The whole point is to
make Python's power available and visible for a larger audience.

-Koos