Steve Holden wrote: > Rick Wotnaz wrote: > >> Michael Hoffman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in >> news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]: >> >>> What would people think about adding sys to __builtins__ so that >>> "import sys" is no longer necessary? This is something I must >>> add to every script I write that's not a one-liner since they >>> have this idiom at the bottom: >>> >>> if __name__ == "__main__": >>> sys.exit(main(sys.argv[1:])) >>> >>> Additionally, the necessity of "import sys" makes some >>> one-liners a little more unwieldy than they should be--it is >>> surely the module I am missing the most in one-liners. For >>> example, with this proposal, this inelegant one-liner: >>> >>> $ python -c "import sys; print >>> ''.join(sorted(sys.stdin.readlines()))" >>> could be replaced by: >>> >>> $ python -c "print ''.join(sorted(sys.stdin.readlines()))" >>> >>> Since sys is surely the most commonly used module (it is >>> imported in 108 of 188 Python 2.4 stdlib modules on my system, >>> and certainly more than any other module), I would hope few >>> people would be affected by a namespace collision. >>> >>> Other languages (e.g. C#) always make their system namespace >>> available without needing a special import. >>> >>> In short, given the wide use of sys, its unambiguous nature, and >>> the fact that it really is built-in already, although not >>> exposed as such, I think we would be better off if sys were >>> always allowed even without an import statement. >> >> >> >> +1 here. As far as I'm concerned, both os and sys could be special- >> cased that way. That said, I would guess the likelihood of that >> happening is 0. > > I wonder if it would be worth special-casing the AttributeError > exception handling at the outermost lexical scope to try and import a > module with the troublesome name and then retrying the attribute access > if the import succeeded (possibly even from a path limited to the > standard locations). > > That way none of the standard library modules would need to be imported > before use. > > I can see that this would create problems as well as solving some, but > it would be nice not to have to import the standard library modules. I > don't personally find it a hardship, but some people do. > > though-i-could-just-be-raving-ly y'rs - steve
This sounds pretty interesting. How about a switch to invoke this handling for the one-liner crowd and those who wish to use it? Somehow, I never heard any C programmers suggest that the default processing not include the need for: #include <stdio.h> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
