Last week I had a ton of fun working with Amy Hanlon on her Harry Potter themed fork of Python, called Nagini. Nagini is full of magic and surprises. It implements the things you’d hope for out of a Harry Potter Python, like making quit into avada_kedavra, and many analogous jokes.

Amy also had the idea to replace import with accio! Replacing import is a much harder problem than renaming a builtin. Python doesn’t prevent you from overwriting builtins, whereas to change keywords you have to edit the grammar and recompile Python. You should go read Amy’s post on making this work.

This brings us to an interesting question: why is import a keyword, anyway? There’s a function, __import__, that does (mostly) the same thing:

1
2

>>> __import__('random')
<module 'random' from '/path/to/random.pyc'>

The function form requires the programmer to assign the return value – the module – to a name, but once we’ve done that it works just like a normal module:

1
2
3

>>> random = __import__('random')
>>> random.random()
0.32574174955668145

The __import__ function can handle all the forms of import, including from foo import bar and from baz import * (although it never modifies the calling namespace). There’s no technical reason why __import__ couldn’t be the regular way to do imports.¹

As far as I can tell, the main argument against an import function is aesthetic. Compare:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

import foo
from foo import bar
import longmodulename as short

foo = __import__('foo')
bar = __import__('random').bar
short = __import__('longmodulename')

The first way certainly feels much cleaner and more readable.²

Part of my goal in my upcoming PyCon talk is to invite Pythonistas to consider decisions they might not have thought about before. import is a great vehicle for this, because everyone learns it very early on in their programming development, but most people don’t ever think about it again. Here’s another variation on that theme: import doesn’t have to be a keyword!