Tom Anderson wrote: > On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Brett Hoerner wrote: > >> Wouldn't the standard idiom be to actually put the code under the >> if-name, and not make a whole new main() function? > > Yes. > > The nice thing about the main() function, though, is that you can do the > most basic argument parsing in the if-block. Like so: > > def powers(n): > m = 1 > while True: > yield m > m = m * n > > def main(n, limit): > for power in powers(n): > if (power > limit): break > print power > > import sys > > if (__name__ == "__main__"): > main(int(sys.argv[1]), int(sys.argv[2])) > > That serves as a sort of documentation on the arguments to the script, and > also makes it easier for other scripts to reuse the main logic of the > program, since they don't have to package parameters up as a string array. > It is more verbose, though. > >> I'm not sure I see the reason behind main(), couldn't that also >> interfere with other modules since main() seems like it might be common, >> not sure how it would work as I'm pretty new to Python myself. > > The two mains would be in different namespaces, so they wouldn't conflict. > >> from script import * > > Don't do that. 'from script import x' is, IMNERHO, bad practice, and 'from > script import *' is exceptionally bad practice. I know a lot of people do, > but that doesn't make it right; namespaces are there for a reason. > > tom >
I haven't a clue what all this means, but it looks important ! lol Thanks for the headsup, will take note of what you've said. Incidentally, at work my main programming platform is VisualStudio .Net, and I never import the children of namespaces so hopefully this practice I have will be carried over to Python. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
