Maintainability (was Re: Stackless & String-processing)

[Tim Peters]

[Fred L. Drake, "import whatever as something_else"]
> ...
>   As I said, I haven't noticed this come up for a while, so maybe I'm
> the only one, but I think this would encourage clarity and
> "localizing" the names of imported modules (adding a leading _ so when
> others "import *" from our modules their namespace isn't polluted too
> much).

New keywords are dead in the water, so maybe you'll find the attached
useful.  Make it fancier, e.g. _my_import(globals(),
something_else="whatever") if you like.  A version of this used to do that,
but with the functional interface it was too confusing for me.

go-ahead-import-my-day-ly y'rs  - tim

def _pvt_import(globs, modname, *items):
    """globs, modname, *items -> import into globs with leading "_".

    If *items is empty, set globs["_" + modname] to module modname.
    If *items is not empty, import each item similarly but don't
    import the module into globs.
    Leave names that already begin with an underscore as-is.

    # import math as _math
    >>> _pvt_import(globals(), "math")
    >>> round(_math.pi, 0)
    3.0

    # import math.sin as _sin and math.floor as _floor
    >>> _pvt_import(globals(), "math", "sin", "floor")
    >>> _floor(3.14)
    3.0
    """

    mod = __import__(modname, globals())
    if items:
        for name in items:
            xname = name
            if xname[0] != "_":
                xname = "_" + xname
            globs[xname] = getattr(mod, name)
    else:
        xname = modname
        if xname[0] != "_":
            xname = "_" + xname
        globs[xname] = mod