Re: [Visualpython-users] Beta test version of VPython for Python 3.1 for Windows

[Bruce S. <bas...@nc...>]

My strong preference and need is for the import by novices (not just
physics students, but other novices as well) to remain what it has
been, "from visual import *", and for the expert, clean import to be
more complex if necessary. However, I'm open to some other one-line
statement for novices if that is what's necessary to satisfy expert
needs. Someone needs to take this on as a project and make a specific
proposal to the community.

Bruce Sherwood

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 6:52 PM, C Anthony Risinger <an...@ex...> wrote:
>>On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 6:30 PM, Bruce Sherwood <bas...@nc...> wrote:
>>> On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Guy K. Kloss <g....@ma...> wrote:
>>>
>>> Wouldn't this be a good point of time to clean up a little bit of the mess
>>> with the wild card imports and the polluted name spaces?
>>
>> Yes, that's a good idea. I myself am not currently up to doing this,
>> but if I recall correctly you had looked into this, yes? It should be
>> done in such a way that the novice can still get everything with "from
>> visual import *", but there should be an optional restrictive import
>> for experts.
>
> I know visual had it roots in assisting physics students, but it seems
> to have really grown beyond that; too strict adherence will deter
> others from furthering it's reach.  In my case, I came across visual
> while developing a real-time, distributed, generic data
> visualizer/analyzer, and the namespace thing was a huge... annoyance
> :-).
>
> Personally, I think the "visual" package should provide specific
> modules for the various things it supports, in a clean, pythonic
> manner.  An alternate "visualphysics" package could perform the
> wildcard imports from numpy and friends to create an environment
> targeted at simulations of physical systems.
>
> Visual to me is, and to others I introduce it as, a simple, intuitive,
> and _generic_ way to design and control 3D spaces from python; physics
> is only one use case.  I don't know how hard it would be to retain the
> current functionality _and_ clean up the namespace... which is why i
> suggest 2 packages, or something like:
>
> from visual.physics import *
>
> at the least, the base "visual" package should be the pythonic version.
>
> C Anthony
>