other python ideas

[Joshua Marshall]

Douglas Alan <nessus at mit.edu> wrote:

> Well, unfortunately you can't do that in my code and never will be
> able to.  I don't put my imports at the top of the file -- I put them
> close to where the module is used, which is where the imports belong.
> (At least in my code, that's where they belong.)  There are all sorts
> of things that one might in some conceivable programming language put
> at the top of the file to make them more readily visible, but to me,
> keeping declarations close, when possible, to where the declared
> entity is used has almost always turned out to be the wisest thing.

And further, I find it useful to keep many imports inside function
definitions, so the importing is done lazily.  This also makes
circular module dependencies easy to deal with.