I've been reading a lot of python modules lately to see how they work and I've stumbled across something that's sort of annoying and wanted to find out of there was a good reason behind it. In a Perl program when you're calling other modules you'll add "use" statements at the beginning of your script like:
use strict; use WWW::Mechanize; use CGI; This seems to be the de facto standard in the Perl community but in python it seems most of the code I look at has import statements everywhere in the code. Is there a sound reason for putting the imports there are are developers just loading modules in as they need them. I own Damian Conway's book of Perl Best Practices and it seems from a maintainability standpoint that having all the modules declared at the beginning would make it easier for someone coming behind you to see what other modules they need to use yours. Being new I didn't know if there was a performance reason for doing this or it is simply a common habit of developers. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
