On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 6:52 PM, Martin v. Löwis <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
..
>> One reason is the desire to avoid loading Python module from a
>> C-module.
>
> This desire is indeed no guidance for Python development; the opposite
> is the case.

Can you elaborate on this?  I did notice the current trend of mixing
software layers and welcoming circular dependencies in Python stdlib,
but I am not sure this is a good thing.  In the good old times imports
inside functions where frowned upon.  (And for many good reasons.)
Imports from inside C functions seem to be even worse.  Tricks like
this greatly reduce understandability of the code.  The import
statements at the top of the module tell a great deal about what the
module can and cannot do.  When modules can be imported at will as a
side-effect of innocuous looking functions (time.strptime is my
personal pet peeve), analysis of the programs becomes much more
difficult.

>  The only exception may be bootstrapping issues, which I
> claim are irrelevant in this case.

It is hard to tell without attempting an implementation, but my
intuition is exactly the opposite.  I believe parts of the import
mechanism have been implemented in Python and it seems to me that
os.stat() may need to be available before decimal can be imported.