Understanding how Python works
Python is a regular language, which means that function definitions, class definitions, import statements etc. mostly work at any scope. But there’s an exception for “from ... import *“, which can’t be used inside a function. The reason why turns out to reveal something interesting about the internals of Python.
Python is a pretty regular language; it follows patterns. Most of the time if you can do something in a function, you can do it in global scope or in a class definition or vice versa. There’s an exception for from ... import *, which works at global scope but not inside a function. The reason why turns out to tell us something interesting about Python internals.
Continue reading “Why doesn’t import * work at function scope?”
In future posts I want to delve into some of the internals of Python, and in order to demonstrate what’s going on I’m going to be taking apart some bytecode. In this post I’ll go over some of the basics, so if you’ve never looked at Python bytecode before this is the place to start.