Callable modules?

[Huaiyu Zhu]

Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:
>Huaiyu Zhu wrote:
>> 
>> Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:
>> >Paul Rubin wrote:
>[about putting __call__ in modules]
>> >Although you can do as you wish, of course, I want to chime in
>> >with a "this is a really bad idea" and hope you don't follow through
>> >on it.  This is, even in the best case, going to make your code
>> >less readable to anyone else.  It is also likely to cause maintainability
>> >problems because making the claim "but this module has only one function!"
>> >almost certainly means it will not stay that way forever.
>> 
>> Why is this so?  Modules appear to be just singletons associated with files.
>> Why making them more similar to other objects would make programs less
>> readable?  Maybe some examples of usage would help to clarify the issues.
>> As a counterexample, I've been confused many times by 'from foo import foo',
>> not knowing which foo is which.
>
>You can make them as similar to other objects as you wish, but it wouldn't
>change my opinion that "module" refers to a specific *kind* of object for
>which the __call__ convention has little or no merit.  I'm not saying it
>should not be there, just that it should not be used if it is.  :-)

That's still a claim without support.  I take it to mean that there is no
known reason at all (such as readability) that it should not be there or
that it should not be used if it is there.

Huaiyu