[Tutor] bad name in module

[Dave Angel]

On 05/10/2013 01:45 AM, Jim Mooney wrote:
> I have a simple program, below, to create a specified list of random
> integers, which works fine.
> I saved it to Lib as makeRandomList.py, then imported it to a
> sorter.py program, like so. The import doesn't fail:
>
> import makeRandomList
>
> newRandomList = createRandomList()
>
>    But I then get the following error:
>
> File "c:\Python33\Progs\sorter.py", line 3, in <module>
> builtins.NameError: name 'createRandomList' is not defined
>
>    What am I doing wrong in creating the library module below, which
> works fine as a standalone?
>

The module is fine, but you need to understand better how to reference 
it when importing.

The normal import statement makes a namespace, which contains all the 
top-level symbols in the module.

So  import makeRandomList

creates a new namespace makeRandomList, which contains in this case one 
symbol.  To call the function, you need to use that namespace:

newRandomList = makeRandomList.createRandomList()


Alternatively, if there are only a few symbols (one in this case) you 
need from the imported namespace, you can name them in the other import 
form:

from makeRandomList import createRandomList

Now you can just call createRandomList() directly.


These are the same rules you use when importing from somebody else's 
library.  So when you want to use the argv symbol from the sys library, 
you can either do this:

import sys

and use  sys.argv in your code.  Or you can use

from sys import argv

and now you can use argv directly.



-- 
DaveA