Thanks guys - all great responses that answered my question in a few different ways with the addition of some other useful tidbits!
This is a nice summary: > In general the idea is to move the test from 'every time I need to do > something' to 'once when some name is defined'. Gotta love the response time of this newsgroup... Russ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
