Import a module without executing it?

[Andy Gross]

> So, in Smalltalk, the way you find out about what's in the system is 
> reflection...you ask the classes what methods they implement (if 
> looking for 'implementors'), you ask the methods for the source and 
> can string search the code (if looking for senders).

There's no real way to get the source code from a compiled code object 
, although there are some tools, like decompyle, which will try for 
you.   I think some people on this list were discussing the potential 
utility of having a __source__ attribute for code objects, but Python 
currently doesn't do this.  You can probably also get some mileage out 
of the inspect module (try 'pydoc inspect'), but that *does* compile 
the code you're inspecting.

> It worked fine for a file that just defined functions and classes. 
> However, files that had code not contained in classes or functions 
> caused a bit of a problem because loading the module would execute 
> that code and that's not what I wanted.

To get at top-level module code like this, you'll have to parse the 
file and walk the AST - there's no other way.  In a well implemented 
library or app, however, there typically shouldn't be much important 
code being executed at the top level.  Typically the top-level code 
will be initialization of singleton globals or decorator-type function 
wrappers, and you can get at most of the important names reflectively 
through the inspect module.

/arg