[Python-Dev] PEP 328 -- relative and multi-line import

[Jeremy Hylton]

On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 17:53, Aahz wrote:
> > Is anyone championing PEP 328?  This is planned for inclusion in 2.4,
> > but not much movement has happened.  If it's stuck on the decision
> > whether to use multiple dots (one per level up) or a single dot (to
> > indicate searching upwards until found), I'm willing to pronounce that
> > it should be multiple dots.
> > 
> > At least "from . import X" and "from .. import X" are completely clear
> > and more levels up are not likely to occur in practice...
> 
> I'm working on producing an edit, but if you just want to Pronounce,
> that's fine with me.  There hasn't been a lot of emotion attached, and
> nobody has gotten seriously annoyed with the multiple dot idea.

I'd say count me seriously annoyed with the multiple dot idea, but I'm
trying not to be annoyed (or annoying) on python-dev today.  In general,
I'm not a fan of relative imports; I'd rather stick to absolute imports
all the time.

Given my general outlook, I think a variable number of dots is simply
weird and would be hard to read.  "Is that three or four dots?"  I'd
like to think the number of dots would be small, but I've spent a lot of
time working on a project with packages hierarchies six levels deep.

Jeremy