Shortcut for if __name__ == '__main__':

Question

Is there a shorter form of this?

if __name__ == '__main__':

It is pretty tedious to write, and also doesn't look very nice in my opinion :)

Answer 1

PEP299 proposed a solution to this wart, namely having a special function name __main__. It was rejected, partly because:

Guido pronounced that he doesn't like the idea anyway as it's "not worth the change (in docs, user habits, etc.) and there's nothing particularly broken."

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0299/

So the ugliness will stay, at least as long as Guido's the BDFL.

Answer 2

Basically every python programmer does that. So simply live with it. ;)

Besides that you could omit it completely if your script is always meant to be run as an application and not imported as a module - but you are encouraged to use it anyway, even if it's not really necessary.

Answer 3

After asking this question, I decided to make a solution to it:

from automain import *  # will only import the automain decorator

@automain
def mymain():
    print 'this is our main function'

The blog post explains it, and the code is on github and can be easy_installed:

easy_install automain