How am I doing?

[Mike Meyer]

"Brett Hoerner" <bretthoerner at gmail.com> writes:

> Wouldn't the standard idiom be to actually put the code under the
> if-name, and not make a whole new main() function?

Depends on how big the main() function is. By making it a function,
you make it possible for other modules to run it directly. In
particular, if foo.py goes into the python library, then "foo" can be:

    #!/usr/bin/env python

    from foo import main
    main()

which means your main gets the (rather trivial) benefit of being
precompiled.

> I'm not sure I see the reason behind main(), couldn't that also
> interfere with other modules since main() seems like it might be
> common, not sure how it would work as I'm pretty new to Python myself.
>  from script import * ... what happens when you have two main()s?

You can't have two main()s. You can *define* two main()s, but only one
of them can be bound to that name. So yes, if you do "from foo import *",
then you can lose the binding to one of the mains. But if your code
isn't in a routine, you can't get to it by name anyway. In any case,
"from foo import *" is frowned upon - it makes it hard to figure out
where the variables in the namespace you do that in came from.

      <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.