WedWonder: Scripts and Modules

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 6:34 AM DL Neil via Python-list
<python-list at python.org> wrote:
>
> In this day-and-age do you have a script in live/production-use, which
> is also a module? What is the justification/use case?
>

Yes, absolutely. It's the easiest way to share code between two
scripts. Here's an example that I created recently:

https://github.com/Rosuav/shed/blob/master/BL1_find_items.py
https://github.com/Rosuav/shed/blob/master/BL2_find_items.py

These programs do similar jobs on very different formats of file, so
there's a small amount of common code and a large amount that isn't
common. One of the common sections is the FunctionArg class, which
ties in with argparse; it's implemented in BL1_find_items, and then
imported into BL2_find_items.

Of course I could break this out into its own dedicated file... but
why bother? It's not significant enough to warrant its own module, and
I don't see any value in an importable file of "all the stuff that I
might feel like importing"; it's just these two files that will need
this.

Basically, the script/module distinction is a convenient way to
simplify a common situation that doesn't need the overhead of anything
else. If the code starts getting used in lots more places, it'll
eventually get promoted to actual module.

ChrisA