On Wed, 10 Dec 2008 at 14:53, _wolf wrote:
thanks for your answer. i am aware that imports are not designed to have side-effects, but this is exactly what i want: to trigger an action with `import foo`. you get foo, and doing this can have a side- effect for the module, in roughly the way that a `from __future__ import with_statement` changes the interpretation of the current module (of course, i do not intend to effect syntactic changes---my idea is to look into the module namespace and modify it). think of it as ?metamodule programming? (? la metaclass programming).maybe import hooks are the way to go? somtimes it would be good if there was a signalling system that broadcasts all kinds of system state change. cheers & ~flow ok so the question is: how to make it so each import of a given module has a side-effect, even repeated imports?
Why can't you have the code that is doing the import subsequently call a function from the module to produce whatever side effect it is you want? Explicit is better than implicit. A python programmer is going to expect that importing a module is idempotent, and breaking that assumption strikes me as a bad idea. Maybe you should give us more details about what problem it is you are trying to solve. There might be a good pythonic way to solve it. --RDM
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