How am I doing?

[Jason]

Tom Anderson wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Brett Hoerner wrote:
> 
>> Wouldn't the standard idiom be to actually put the code under the 
>> if-name, and not make a whole new main() function?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> The nice thing about the main() function, though, is that you can do the 
> most basic argument parsing in the if-block. Like so:
> 
> def powers(n):
>  	m = 1
>  	while True:
>  		yield m
>  		m = m * n
> 
> def main(n, limit):
>  	for power in powers(n):
>  		if (power > limit): break
>  		print power
> 
> import sys
> 
> if (__name__ == "__main__"):
>  	main(int(sys.argv[1]), int(sys.argv[2]))
> 
> That serves as a sort of documentation on the arguments to the script, and 
> also makes it easier for other scripts to reuse the main logic of the 
> program, since they don't have to package parameters up as a string array. 
> It is more verbose, though.
> 
>> I'm not sure I see the reason behind main(), couldn't that also 
>> interfere with other modules since main() seems like it might be common, 
>> not sure how it would work as I'm pretty new to Python myself.
> 
> The two mains would be in different namespaces, so they wouldn't conflict.
> 
>> from script import *
> 
> Don't do that. 'from script import x' is, IMNERHO, bad practice, and 'from 
> script import *' is exceptionally bad practice. I know a lot of people do, 
> but that doesn't make it right; namespaces are there for a reason.
> 
> tom
> 

I haven't a clue what all this means, but it looks important ! lol

Thanks for the headsup, will take note of what you've said.

Incidentally, at work my main programming platform is VisualStudio .Net, 
and I never import the children of namespaces so hopefully this practice 
I have will be carried over to Python.