Incompatible idioms: relative imports, top-level program file

[Rustom Mody]

On Sunday, February 8, 2015 at 3:52:19 AM UTC+5:30, Gregory Ewing wrote:
> Rustom Mody wrote:
> > Wanted to try out sympy.
> > apt-install promised ź GB download, ž GB space usage
> > 
> > Just getting a src-tarball was: 6M download, 30M after opening the tar.
> 
> Have you actually tried compiling and using that
> tarball, though?
> 
> Sympy hooks into a lot of other libraries that
> are themselves quite large. Apt-get was probably
> planning to download and install all of them,
> hence the large download size.
> 
> If you tried to install from source, you would
> likely have to install all those dependencies
> yourself, or configure it to skip the ones you
> don't want if it allows that.
> 
> -- 
> Greg

Yeah...
Sympy output as on display http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/jrjohansson/scientific-python-lectures/blob/master/Lecture-5-Sympy.ipynb
looks quite beautiful and probably needs all those Tex etc fonts

As it happens I did not need that
I just wanted to demo some differences between object-level and meta-level .
I guess the best choice for that would be lisp.
I could not figure racket out – terminologies seem to have changed in the last couple of decades – so I took sympy's distinction of python-variable and math-variable as a good enough exemplar of meta-level and object-level.
[Python's namespaces are not really firstclass like (some) scheme's are -- eg locals() makes a copy]

Anyway… My point was not that particular use-case but the general point that 
one may 
want to play around with alternate packaging systems