RE: [Fwd: Lament: Import is not very smart.]

Paul Prescod wrote:

> Another Python quirk to avoid...

> I don't know if this is a bug or a feature, but it sure is 
> annoying. I apologize if it's already been discussed to death 
> elsewhere (I couldn't find anything).
> 
> Suppose that you've a package named "foo" which contains module "bar".
>   Because you're careless, you've also put foo/ into your path...
> 
> Here's the problem:
> 
> >> import foo.bar
> >> import bar
> >> foo.bar == bar
> False
> 
> The second import doesn't recognize that "bar" is already 
> loaded as foo.bar, and loads the module again.  I know it's 
> easy to avoid this by being consistent, but wouldn't be more 
> intuitive if import checked a hash of loaded module filenames 
> before importing something anew? E.g.
> 
> >> import foo.bar
> >> import bar
> >> foo.bar == bar
> True
> 
> It's probably too late to change, but it's food for thought.

Isn't package also a namespace?  Wouldn't this feature destroy that
namespace feature?