Re: [Visualpython-users] Let's hash out the documentation for restrictive imports

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

The issue is that importing visual also imports math and numpy, and
does some tricky stuff to make sure that, for example, sqrt(scalar)
uses the fast math.sqrt routine, not the numpy.sqrt routine which is
much slower when acting on scalars.

For a large group of casual users, and for backward compatibility with
sizable numbers of programs in existence, it is important that "from
visual import *" continue to behave as it has in the past. Note that
"import visual as vp" also imports math and numpy, so that you'll find
that vp.sqrt(3) does not give an error, nor does
vp.sqrt(vp.array([3,3,3])).

For a small but important group of expert users, it is important to
have a way to import the visual objects and vector operations without
importing anything else, and I've proposed a couple of different
approaches, one of which requires including a couple of new files in
the visual directory.

What I'm seeking is which of these approaches for experts (or a
different one) is the one the experts would prefer to be documented
and encouraged.

Bruce Sherwood

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 11:39 AM, Symion <kn...@ip...> wrote:
> Hi there,
>     This is probably a naive question, but why not implement visual the same
> way as the other modules?