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.

Ethan Furman wrote:

The strongest reason for not doing this is that it pollutes the current namespace, not that it obliterates the 'pkg' namespace.

Sorry, I phrased that badly. When I said "obliterates the 'pkg' namespace" I was referring to dumping the 'pkg' namespace into the current namespace (polluting it, as you would say).

How would that be different from --> import pkg

Because that does not import all of the (public) modules and packages under 'pkg'. For example scipy has has a subpackage 'linalg'. If I just do 'import scipy' then I can not refer to 'scipy.linalg' until I do 'import scipy.linalg'.

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

By the way, this sort of question should probably go to the python-ideas mailing list for any extended discussion.

Sorry, didn't realize that would be the more appropriate list.

Thanks, Brendan