[Python-ideas] Importing public symbols and simultainiously privatizing them, is too noisy

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 12:31 PM, Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas
<python-ideas at python.org> wrote:
> This seems like something that shouldn't be done in general, so doesn't need a language fix--but if you for some specific reason need to do it all the time, just write a function for it:
>
>     def _postimport(mod, names):
>         g = sys._getframe(1).f_globals
>         for name in names.split():
>             g['_'+name] = mod[name]
>
> So:
>
>     import thingy
>     _postimport(thingy, 'spam eggs cheese')
>     use(_spam, _cheese)
>
> Of course you can wrap up the import and _postimport in a single function:
>
>   _magic_from_import('thingy', 'spam eggs cheese')
>
> Or use MacroPy to make the syntax nicer.
>
> Or, if even that's not good enough, write a simple token-processing import hook that finds "_import" tokens and converts them to calls to your wrapper function.
>
> Of course the farther you go down this path, the less readable your code becomes to someone who doesn't know about your function/macro/hook, but if there's really so much boilerplate that it's getting in the way, the tradeoff might be worth it.
>

... and then you decide, hey, let's just define __all__ and not worry
about adorning all those names with underscores, because the
definition of public vs private can be independent of the symbols
themselves.

ChrisA