"Dick Moores" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote > I'm having trouble with the concept of a name in Python. > > Is a name the same as anything defined?
Yes pretty much anything that has a name. It could be a variable, a class, a module, a function, anything that you can refer to or can refer to an object (bearing in mind that modules, functions and classes are objects in Python!) Its worth spending the time reading and playing with this because its a fundamental concept in Python and once understood many of the seeming anomolies become clear. I tend to think of it this way. Python does most things using dictionaries. The names we define in our code are merely keys into some semi-hidden dictionaries. The values of the dictionaries are the things the names reference - values, classes, functions etc When you import a module (import x) you reference the module dictionary so still need to derefence it (eg. sys.exit) When you import from a module (from x import *) you copy the keys into your local dictionary so you don't need to dereference them. That's almost certainly not a technically correct explanation of how importing really works but its conceptually how I think about it. :-) HTH, -- Alan Gauld Author of the Learn to Program web site http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
