Over time, I've come to the opinion that some programming tricks are more damaging to your code'sreadability than others. I think that there are at least two sorts ofcoding tricks, which I will call opaque tricks and impossible tricks,and impossible tricks are more damaging than opaque tricks.

An opaque trick is one where the reader stares at the code and has noidea what it does. Either they don't understand the operations, orthey don't understand what the results of doing the

From the reddit discussion and also the comments of my previous entry on import ,I learned that people both do ' import os.path ' and then useos.whatever without explicitly importing os , and do ' import os 'and then just use os.path.whatever without explicitly importing os.path .

First off, I don't think that you should do either of these even if(and when) they work, for os or any other module. This is a stylisticthing, but when doing

From Nate Lawson's most recent entry :

Most public key systems fail catastrophically if you ignore any oftheir requirements. You can decrypt RSA messages if the padding is notrandom ,for example. With DSA, many implementation mistakes expose thesigner's private key.

(emphasis mine.)

Even small implementation mistakes are dangerous to crypto systems,but there are degrees of danger. Most of the time, 'all' that happensis that a bad implementation doesn't deliver either the encryption orthe endpoint authentication