A mistake which almost went me mad

[Tim Chase]

On 2016-03-03 16:29, Oscar Benjamin wrote:
> On 3 March 2016 at 11:48, Tim Chase <python.list at tim.thechases.com>
> wrote:
> > On 2016-03-03 10:43, Nick Sarbicki wrote:
> >> The number of times I've had to correct a student for naming
> >> their script "turtle.py".
> >>
> >> And the number of times I've caught myself doing it...
> >
> > I'm surprised at the number of times I find myself creating an
> > "email.py" DESPITE KNOWING BETTER EVERY SINGLE TIME.
> 
> This mistake is too easy to make and should be fixed in the language
> somehow. There's no way that a novice user can know which module
> names are implicitly "reserved" by being used somewhere in the
> stdlib or the collection of 3rd party modules that they may happen
> to have installed.

I think that relative imports should ameliorate this, as I usually
hit it when I'm using smtplib which in turn imports "email" (and, in
2.x when it found my local email.py would crash and burn). If it used
a relative import that forced it to find the one in the stdlib, it
should(?) prevent it from finding my local version first.

-tkc