Is there Python equivalent to Perl BEGIN{} block?

[Carl Banks]

On Mar 12, 8:11 pm, Justus Schwabedal <justus.schwabe... at gmx.de>
wrote:
> What do you need it for anyway? I just read about it and I think it's
> useless
> in python.


Perl, like Python, has a separate compilation and run times.  One day,
someone who was trying to use Perl for something asked, "You know,
wouldn't it be neat-o if you could execute some Perl code *before* you
compiled the script?"  And so (since that's usually enough reason to
add something to Perl) was borne the BEGIN block.

I believe the official rationale was that they wanted to add some
magic variables that affected Perl's compilation and couldn't do it
without a magic block that executed at compile time.

Python solved a similar problem by introducing __future__ imports.


Carl Banks