A question related to the PYTHONPATH

[dieter]

adrien oyono <adrienoyono at gmail.com> writes:
> I have recently read the documentation about how imports work on python,
> and I was wondering why, when you execute a python file, the current
> directory is not added by default to the PYTHONPATH ?

Maybe, to avoid surprises?

You can invoke a script from different positions in your file system.
If PYTHONPATH would automatically get ".", the script's behaviour
could depend on the position from where it is called.

Prepending "." to "PYTHONPATH" could have dramatic effects:
assume your script uses module "xxx" and your current working
directory accidentally has a "xxx.py"; then this "xxx.py" would
be used and it may behave much differently from another one.

The problem is not so severe when "." is appended to "PYTHONPATH".
Nevertheless, it likely is not a good idea to have script behaviour
depending by default on the execution location.