Python equivalent for C module

[Aaron Brady]

On Oct 20, 12:19 pm, Derek Martin <c... at pizzashack.org> wrote:
snip
>
> I'm specifically trying to avoid having to create a debug object and
> pass it around... All modules should have visibility into the state of
> whether DEBUG is turned on or off, and be able to use dprint().  Can
> Python do this?
>
> I tried creating debug.py as such:
>
> ---- debug.py ----
> DEBUG = True
> def dprint(msg):
>     if DEBUG:
>         print("DEBUG: %s" % msg)
> ---- end ----
>
> Then in the modules that wanted to use it, I did:
>
> from debug import DEBUG, dprint
>
> But I got some weird behavior.  The imported copy of DEBUG is
> read-only; if you update it, the name DEBUG points to a different
> object which the other modules can't see.  After doing some reading of
> the docs, this behavior is explained and understood (though obviously
> not what I want).  It just occured to me that I might be able to get
> around that by using a setter function in the module itself... I'll
> try this later.
>
> The other weird behavior was, once I changed the value of DEBUG,
> dprint() started to behave oddly.  No matter what I passed as an
> argument (and no matter what I set the value of DEBUG to be), it
> started printing the exact literal string:
>
> DEBUG: %s
>
> whenever it was called.  It was as if the function couldn't see the
> parameter msg, which was passed via the call.  Most unexpected, and
> definitely undesirable.
>

It should work if you set the attribute of the module directly.

(untested)
import debug
debug.DEBUG= True
debug.DEBUG= False

Your idea of a module getter/setter should work too.

def set_debug( val ):
  global DEBUG
  DEBUG= val

Can't help with the other problem.  Simplify a little with just
print( msg ).