Clashing cmp

[tre17 at student.canterbury.ac.nz]

Andrew Dalke <dalke at bioreason.com> writes:

[discussion of `cmp' name clash snipped]
> 
> Here was my workaround:
> 
> # "cmp" module compares two files using the cmp() function.
> # Work around an ugliness in Python since cmp() is also a builtin!
> old_cmp = cmp
> from cmp import cmp
> file_compare = cmp
> cmp = old_cmp
> 
> It was nice to have the functionality handy.  I can say, though,
> that I started by looking for it in shutil, since I figured it
> was natural to have file "compare" next to "copy" and "rmtree".
> 
> So I would have no problem moving the cmp functionality (the
> functions "cmp" and "do_cmp") into shutil and renaming "cmp"
> to "file_compare" and "do_cmp" to "do_file_compare".

Or, for those that really like __ names, use one peice of ugliness to
solve another:

>>> filecmp = __import__('cmp')

I have sometimes thought that it would be nice to have something like:

>>> import cmp as filecmp

or even:

>>> import cPickle as pickle

But that's probably just going to be way to open to abuse.  In the
first example at least it's obvious that something weird is happening.

--
Tim Evans