[SciPy-user] Re: [SciPy-dev] MCMC, Kalman Filtering, AI for SciPy?

[Pearu Peterson]

On Tue, 28 Sep 2004, Fernando Perez wrote:

> Travis Oliphant schrieb:
>
>> This is the delayed import mechanism again (not info).   The fancyness 
>> hurts some tools that rely on introspection.  I'm not sure if the problem 
>> can be resolved as I very much want the delayed import functionality.
>
> I realize that the delayed import functionality is pretty critical, but I 
> think that breaking help() is kind of bad :)  Unfortunately I know that the 
> delayed import system plays a lot of fancy tricks to get things done, and I 
> don't know the code well enough to offer a fix myself.
>
> But hopefully this can be fixed at some point, I'm willing to believe it's 
> possible to somehow work things out.  One option might be for scipy, upon 
> import, to inject its own help() wrapper into __builtins__.  This wrapper 
> could then detect whether it's being called with a string, in which case it 
> could try to avoid the delayed import things which break the normal help() 
> calls, or if it's called with an object name, case in which throwing a 
> NameError for undefined things is OK.  I know this is only a hand-wavy 
> sketch, but I just am not quite willing to swallow that a solution is 
> 'impossible', knowing the flexibility of python.  But since I can't really 
> offer code right now, I won't complain either ;)

This issue is now fixed in CVS. Btw, ppimport hooks actually work very 
similar to what you describe above ;-)

Pearu