How about some syntactic sugar for " __name__ == '__main__' "?

[John Ladasky]

I have taught Python to several students over the past few years.  As I have worked with my students, I find myself bothered by the programming idiom that we use to determine whether a module is being executed or merely imported:

  "if __name__ == '__main__':"

The use of two dunder tokens -- one as a name in a namespace, and the other as a string, is intimidating.  It exposes too much of Python's guts.  As such, I think that it is less Pythonic than we might want.  Myself, I've been programming in Python for a decade, and I still haven't dug very deeply into what exactly __name__ means or does.

I would like to start a discussion about whether Python should include a function which executes this evaluation, and hides all of the unfriendly dunderish details.  And if that's a good idea, I would invite a discussion of how, exactly, it should be implemented.  I'm nowhere near proposing a PEP, but that may come later.

Thanks for your thoughts.