I assume one cause of the misunderstanding was the name "path" for the search path. If it had been named "paths" it would have been more obvious. But Python is only following a common standard here. Since environment variables are called PATH, CLASSPATH etc. it was only logical to use PYTHONPATH and sys.path etc. Therefore the imp module uses "pathname" where it is only a single path.
Probably the people who once invented the env variables didn't care about writing PATHS because it sounds like PATH anyway (or is there a difference? I am German). Anyway, the docs are technically correct. Maybe the best solution would not to improve the docs but to allow path to be a string in which case it would be treated as [string]. -- Christoph -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
