Magic Module Methods?

[David Bolen]

Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> writes:

> Let me suggest another reason __getattr__ might be useful for modules.
> Suppose you had a package made up of lots of modules.  Instead of importing
> all of those modules into the package when the package was imported, with
> __getattr__ could you defer import until first access?

Although you can already do this today via other mechanisms.  For
example, the LazyModule class used by the mx packages - an instance is
assigned in the main module __init__ to each submodule name.  Then as
a class instance, it does get the __getattr__ call at which point it
imports the child module and then loads its dictionary into its own
instance.

Also, a downside to any of the "lazy" schemes is that they tend to do
a nice job of confusing packaging tools such as py2exe and installer.

--
-- David
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