On Mon, 2009-06-22 at 14:57 +0200, Jean-Michel Pichavant wrote: > J. Cliff Dyer wrote: > > On Wed, 2009-06-17 at 14:13 +0200, Jean-Michel Pichavant wrote: > > > >> On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 04:14, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > >> > >>>> What's np.arange? > >>>> > >>>> > >>> import numpy as np > >>> > >>> -- > >>> Pierre "delroth" Bourdon <delr...@gmail.com> > >>> Étudiant à l'EPITA / Student at EPITA > >>> > >>> > >> Perfect example of why renaming namespaces should be done only when > >> absolutely required, that is, almost never. > >> > >> Jean-Michel > >> > > > > I disagree. Renaming namespaces should always be done if it will help > > stop people from doing a 'from package import *'. However, example code > > should always include relevant imports. > > > > Cheers, > > Cliff > > > > > > > The import * should not used if possible, I totally agree on that point, > but there's no need to rename namespaces for that. > > br > > Jean-Michel >
Technically, no. But we're dealing with people, who are notoriously *un*technical in their behavior. A person is much more likely to develop bad habits if the alternative means more work for them. The reason people do `from foo import *` is that they don't want to type more than they have to. If they can write a one or two letter namespace, they're likely to be happy with that trade-off. If the alternative is to write out long module names every time you use a variable, they'll tend to develop bad habits. To paraphrase Peter Maurin, coding guidelines should have the aim of helping to "bring about a world in which it is easy to be good." I don't really see much problem with renaming namespaces: For people reading the code, everything is explicit, as you can just look at the top of the module to find out what module a namespace variable represent; the local namespace doesn't get polluted with God knows what from God knows where; and code remains succinct. I've found in my own code that using, for example, the name `sqlalchemy` in my code means that I have to go through painful contortions to get your code down to the PEP-8 recommended 80 characters per line. The resulting mess of multi-line statements is significantly less readable than the same code using the abbreviation `sa`. Do you have an argument for avoiding renaming namespaces? So far the only example you provided is a code fragment that doesn't run. I don't disagree with you on that example; referring to numpy as np without telling anyone what np refers to is a bad idea, but no functioning piece of code could reasonably do that. Cheers, Cliff -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
