PEP 328: Imports: Multi-Line and Absolute/Relative

In article <104q64b2uf3nl0b at news.supernews.com>,
John Roth <newsgroups at jhrothjr.com> wrote:
>>I think this is a serious conceptual issue, and I'd prefer to not>support upwards references at all.  That doesn't mean they should be>prohibited, but if someone wants to dig a pit for himself with circular>coupling across module hierarchies, then he should be required to>wield the shovel himself. It is not, after all, that difficult to>sort through sys.modules to figure out where you are in the import>hierarchy.

While that makes some sense, what about "uncle" references within the
current package?

>That leaves references to the current package.  I'm going to suggest an>"*" as an indicator for "this package." The reason for an asterisk is>my background in mainframe assembler: it means "here" in that language,>so I'm obviously not particularly attached to it. It's also already in>use in the "from foo import *" syntax.>>A reference beginning in the current directory is thus:>>import *.spam.eggs

That's functionally equivalent to the suggested

import .spam.eggs
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"Do not taunt happy fun for loops. Do not change lists you are looping over."
--Remco Gerlich, comp.lang.python