Barry Warsaw, writing for the Python steering council, has announced that PEP 810 (“Explicit lazy imports”) has been approved, unanimously, by the four who could vote. Since Pablo Galindo Salgado was one of the PEP authors, he did not vote. The PEP provides a way to defer importing modules until the names defined in a module are needed by other parts of the program. We covered the PEP and the discussion around it a few weeks back. The council also had “recommendations about some of the PEP’s details, a few suggestions for filling a couple of small gaps”, including:

Use lazy as the keyword. We debated many of the given alternatives (and some we came up with ourselves), and ultimately agreed with the PEP’s choice of the lazy keyword. The closest challenger was defer, but once we tried to use that in all the places where the term is visible, we ultimately didn’t think it was as good an overall fit. The same was true with all the other alternative keywords we could come up with, so... lazy it is!

What about from foo lazy import bar? Nope! We like that in both module imports and from-imports that the lazy keyword is the first thing on the line. It helps to visually recognize lazy imports of both varieties.