2.3.9.1 Modules

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2.3.9.1 Modules

The only special operation on a module is attribute access: `m.name`, where m is a module and name accesses a name defined in m's symbol table. Module attributes can be assigned to. (Note that the `import` statement is not, strictly speaking, an operation on a module object; `import foo` does not require a module object named foo to exist, rather it requires an (external) definition for a module named foo somewhere.)

A special member of every module is `__dict__`. This is the dictionary containing the module's symbol table. Modifying this dictionary will actually change the module's symbol table, but direct assignment to the `__dict__` attribute is not possible (you can write `m.__dict__['a'] = 1`, which defines `m.a` to be `1`, but you can't write `m.__dict__ = {}`).

Modules built into the interpreter are written like this: `<module 'sys' (built-in)>`. If loaded from a file, they are written as `<module 'os' from '/usr/local/lib/python2.3/os.pyc'>`.