import and package confusion

[Dale Amon]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 03:06:13PM -0700, Scott David Daniels wrote:
> You did not answer the question above, and I think the answer is the root
> of your misunderstanding.  A class and a module are _not_the_same_thing_.
> sys is not a package, it is a module.
>>> Just because you put a class inside a module, does not mean
>>> that class magically does something by virtue of having the
>>> same name as the module.
>>>
>>> A module is a namespace to hold classes, functions, etc....
>>> A package is a namespace to hold modules (possibly more).
>>>
>>> I don't understand why you don't use files like:
>>>
>>> 	VLMLegacy/
>>>          __init__.py
>>>          Reader.py
>>>          VLM4997.py
>>>          WINGTL.py
> Unlike Java, we are free to have several things in a module:
> several classes, several functions, several constants....

These modules would grow to be hundreds of pages long and a 
difficult to deal with to debug a problem related to one obscure 
system without looking at (or potentially screwing up) any of the
others. I prefer one class per module.

This gets more into philosophy, but I figure any function or method
that does not fit on one page is too big; and any source file that
is more than 20 pages long should be broken in half. I like my modules
in the 5-10 page size range, including the embedded Unix ManPages and
the cvs history. But that's just my house style.

> Well, "VLM4997" is a _string_, and it has no attributes (nor methods)
> named "Header", "Plan", or "Conditions."  And "type" is a perfectly awful
> name for a variable, since it hides the builtin named type.  You seem to
> confuse names, files, and classes defined in files (at least in your  
> writing).

Actually I'm not. I am simply trying to use a pseudo code
to explain roughly what is going on. There will be a string
that selects what the set of classes are to be used on any
given iteration and it will be used to generate the name
of the class and/or name of the module where it is to be found.
I'm an old ObjC hacker. I often put the class or method in a
variable and do the bindings at runtime. I am already doing some
of that sort of thing in this system with the method names and 
it works nicely.

The point I take away from this is that packages and
modules have dotted names, but Classes do not and there
is no way to do exactly what I wanted to do. 

The dot syntax would have been quite nice (I quite like the
"::" syntax in Perl) and would have made the code much
clearer. The way you suggested with a 'typename_classname'
generated using a from/import statement will just have to
suffice.




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