On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 7:34 AM, Fred Drake <fdr...@acm.org> wrote: > On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 5:02 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Fred's point about the practice of changing __name__ in the main >> module corrupting generated pickles is one I hadn't thought of before >> though. > > Not sure about changing __name__ anywhere... I don't do that.
The interpreter does though (when it sets it to "__main__" instead of what it would have been if the module had been imported rather than executed). That fact is convincing me that we should leave this alone for now. A module imported as __main__ and a module imported under it's real name are *different*, and this is reflected in pickles they generate and anything else that remembers the values of __name__. Obscuring that by treating them as equivalent in some contexts (such as name shadowing) while they remain different in other significant ways is unlikely to help overall. I must say, this whole discussion is actually making me far more sympathetic to the ideas behind PEP 299 (which proposed __main__ functions as a replacement for __name__ == "__main__" blocks). Brett's rejected PEP 3122 and my own accepted PEP 366 were both a direct result of the interpreter lying about the real value of __name__. I don't have a particular good way forward though, and the one thing I can say about the status quo is that at least everyone is accustomed to having to work around it. And back to the topic of inadvertent shadowing when teaching new users: PEP 3147 should actually help in that regard, as the interpreter will now ignore any implicitly created .pyc files if the corresponding .py file has been removed. Only explicitly created .pyc files that live where the source file would have been can completely substitute for a missing source file now. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
