On 7 April 2017 at 01:53, C Anthony Risinger <anth...@xtfx.me> wrote:
> I occasionally want to do something like this:
>
> import .. as parent
>
> or:
>
> import . as self
>
> The pattern is a little less useful for namespace packages (which I've been
> trying to use almost exclusively, along with relative imports) than it is
> for __init__.py based packages, but there is still some utility.
>
> Is there a reason one can't import dots directly and bind them to a name?
Mainly the fact that globals() already covers most use cases for
module self references, and even when it doesn't the above are (for a
typical module) still only a few lines long:
import sys
self = sys.modules[__name__]
and:
import sys
parent_name, __, __ = __name__.rpartition(".")
parent = sys.modules[parent_name]
Getting a reference to the current module or a parent module is also
considered a sufficiently niche requirement that understanding the
existence and behaviour of the sys.modules cache is considered an
acceptable barrier to entry, over adding yet another variant of the
import statement syntax.
It's definitely a case of "Hasn't been considered worth the extra
language complexity so far" rather than "couldn't be done", though -
the requirement to be met would be to establish that the use cases for
self and parent references are sufficiently common that they're
deserving of dedicated syntactic support on par with that already
offered for peer module references.
Cheers,
Nick.
--
Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia
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