of sys.modules when possible.
This is being done for two reasons. One is to gain a little bit of
performance by skipping an unnecessary dict lookup in sys.modules. But
the other (and main) reason is to be a little bit more clear in how
things should work from the perspective of import's interactions with
loaders. Otherwise loaders can easily forget to return the module even
though PEP 302 explicitly states they are expected to return the module
they loaded.
and relies much more on meta path finders to abstract out various parts of
import.
As part of this the semantics for import_module tightened up and now follow
__import__ much more closely (biggest thing is that the 'package' argument must
now already be imported, else a SystemError is raised).
Benjamin Peterson
Brett Cannon
Ezio Melotti
Brett Cannon