Brendan Moloney wrote:
We all know that doing:
from pkg import *
is bad because it obliterates the 'pkg' namespace. So why not allow something like:
I don't quite know what you mean by obliterating the pkg namespace, but if my guess is correct, you're wrong. One of the problems with import * is that it (potentially) obliterates the caller's namespace, not pkg. That is, if you have a function spam(), and you do "from module import *", and module also has spam(), it blows away your function. The pkg namespace isn't touched -- it's just unavailable to the caller.
import pkg.*
This would still be helpful for interactive sessions while keeping namespaces around.
I don't understand what the difference between that and just "import pkg" would be.
By the way, this sort of question should probably go to the python-ideas mailing list for any extended discussion.