[cctbxbb] Explicit import for iotbx.pdb.amino_acid_codes

[Nathaniel Echols]

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 3:29 AM, Claudia Millán Nebot
<cmncri at ibmb.csic.es> wrote:
> I've just started to look into the cctbx facilities, and as i'm a newbie in
> both object oriented programming and in general to the system, i'm tryng to
> play around and find by myself how things are working. Using the
> cctbx.python, i realised that it is necessary to import explicitly the
> module amino_acid_codes, while for others like atom_name_interpretation this
> is done straigthforward if you do an import from a lower level (like from
> iotbx.pdb import *). Is there some good reason because this has to be like
> that?

I suspect this is a Python quirk - atom_name_interpretation is
imported at the top of iotbx/pdb/__init__.py, amino_acid_codes is not.
 In general, however, I would recommend two rules for dealing with
imports:

1. Always explicitly import any module you want - with the exception
that if you do this:
  import iotbx.pdb.amino_acid_codes
you will also have access to iotbx.pdb as well.  In this case you
might want to do this:
  from iotbx.pdb import amino_acid_codes, atom_name_interpretation
the choice of when to use "from foo import bar" versus "import
foo.bar" is up to you, but the latter is a better idea if there is any
ambiguity in the names of submodules (for instance, anything named
"utils", of which there are probably a half-dozen).

2. Never use "from foo import *" - it's just a bad idea, because
anyone else looking at the code won't be able to tell where a function
comes from.  (Actually, we use this frequently for Boost.Python
extensions, but we shouldn't.)

-Nat