the point of selective importing

[Rioshin an'Harthen]

"Bill Baxter" <Bill_member at pathlink.com> wrote:
> In article <e8urqt$2vb2$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Ameer Armaly says...
>>...
>>It might just be me, but IMHO you're trying to mix apples with oranges;
>>either you want fully qualified imports or you want standard imports.  If
>>you desperately want to mix them, then I agree with Walter in that aliases
>>should be just fine; anyone with half a brain will put them right near the
>>import where they can be seen; anyone who doesn't do that is just a bad
>>coder.
>
> Good points.
>
> But
> A) renaming modules is pretty common once you allow FQN import.
>
> static import module.with.a.long.name.string;
> alias module.with.a.long.name.string Str;
>
> It would be nice to be able to put those into one statement so that the 
> module
> name doesn't have to be typed in twice.
>
> B) Sometimes you want to keep your namespace clean except for a handful of
> specific symbols from some module:
>
> static import module.with.a.long.name;
> alias module.with.a.long.name.foo Foo;
> alias module.with.a.long.name.bar Bar;
> alias module.with.a.long.name.baz Baz;
>
> That would also be easier to read,write, and maintain if 
> module.with.a.long.name
> didn't appear 4 times.
>
> Granted, you could do:
> static import module.with.a.long.name;
> alias module.with.a.long.name MWLN;
> alias MWLN.foo Foo;
> alias MWLN.bar Bar;
> alias MWLN.baz Baz;
>
> which is better, but the full module name still appears twice, and I 
> didn't
> really want MWLN or module.with.a.long.name in my namespace to begin with.
>
> However, I'm starting to agree with Walter, on that one.  There probably 
> aren't
> too many times when you want to import specific symbols without also 
> wanting
> access to the module as a whole.  In the example I gave from my python 
> code,
> "from numpy import transpose as T", the truth is that I also do "import 
> numpy as
> num" in that code.  So I could have just said "T = num.transpose", which 
> would
> be the equivalent of D's "alias num.transpose T;".
>
> That still leaves the need for some sort of way to do:
> static import module.with.a.long.name as MWLN;
> in which MWLN is the *only* symbol introduced into the current namespace.
> (Although I guess in the import-and-rename case 'static' would be 
> redundant, or
> just incorrect since the name *is* changing.)

I would prefer the syntax to be something akin to

alias import module.with.a.long.name MWLN;

which would be exactly like

static import module.with.a.long.name;
alias module.with.a.long.name MWLN;