Re: [Visualpython-users] numpy array in random

[Guy K. K. <g....@ma...>]

On Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:33:53 Bruce Sherwood wrote:
> I should comment that the backwards compatibility issue has lots of 
> ramifications that may not be obvious. For example, there are many faculty
>  who  run demos in their lectures that were written in VPython, and they
>  themselves may not know much about the environment, and they may be
>  running on classroom computers over which they have no control. These
>  computers are periodically updated by a central university classroom
>  technology group. If "from visual import *" breaks due to a new version of
>  Python and Visual being installed, it's an educational disaster when the
>  unsuspecting faculty member in the middle of class finds that an important
>  demo program doesn't run.

Indeed, fully understood. We've discussed that at length.

Maybe we should go that way of "cleaning up" the internal imports (as I've 
done once for the 5.11 version), and then do the wild card import *only* on 
the package level once for the package that needs these imports or backward 
compatibility reasons. Once I've got my thesis handed soon (this 
summer/December), I could assist in patching up the sources again towards that 
goal.

Then we could easily introduce a "shadow" package "visual2", "visual_", 
"visual_clean" or whatever ... which does not include these wild card imports. 
I think this way everybody could be happy and just use what they need, or use 
the default for compatibility reasons.

For a future version (5.2+ or 6.x) then it could be "reversed", so that the 
default becomes a clean "visual", and a "visual_compat" is provided for the 
ones who like it convenient as it was in the past.

Just my two kiwi cents,

Guy

-- 
Guy K. Kloss
Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences
Te Kura Pūtaiao o Mōhiohio me Pāngarau
Massey University, Albany (North Shore City, Auckland)
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