Proposal: Inline Import

[Thomas Heller]

Shane Hathaway <shane at hathawaymix.org> writes:

> Xavier Morel wrote:
>> Shane Hathaway wrote:
>>
>>>Thoughts?
>>  >>> import re; name_expr = re.compile('[a-zA-Z]+')
>>  >>> name_expr
>> <_sre.SRE_Pattern object at 0x00F9D338>
>>  >>>
>> the import statement can be called anywhere in the code, why would
>> you add strange syntactic sugar that doesn't actually bring anything?
>
> That syntax is verbose and avoided by most coders because of the speed
> penalty.  It doesn't replace the idiom of importing everything at the
> top of the module.
>
> What's really got me down is the level of effort required to move code
> between modules.  After I cut 100 lines from a 500 line module and
> paste them to a different 500 line module, I have to examine every
> import in both modules as well as examine the code I moved for missing
> imports. And I still miss a lot of cases.  My test suite catches a lot
> of the mistakes, but it can't catch everything.

I understand this use case.

You can use pychecker to find NameErrors without actually running the
code.  Unfortunately, it doesn't (at least not always) find imports
which are not needed.

Thomas