[Ed]

What's the motivation for restricting it to from-imports? I suspect that this will cause confusion, and it doesn't feel self-consistent to me: why can you call a module ".foo" in one context, and not in another? In particular, I think that if people see that you can do:

from .foo import *

Then they'll assume that they can also do:

import .foo

With the obvious semantics, i.e. equivalence to:

from . import foo

What do we gain by not extending the syntax to from-less imports?

Currently, the rule is that after import <something> you can use <something> in an expression to refer to whatever you imported. This applies to both import foo <--> foo in expressions and import foo.bar <--> foo.bar in expressions But if we were to allow import .foo we'd have to allow .foo in expressions, and I would like to reserve that syntax for the "with" statement. [Werner]

But it would be possible to say:

import .foo as my_foo import foo

and access both through modules through the name they're bound to.

Therefore I'd propose to allow relative from-less imports, but require them to always use the "as" clause.

This just adds more complexity; there's nothing you can do without this addition. [Jack]

Is "from . import *" allowed? Whenever I start to think about it I tend to go into oscillation (yes because within package foo its the same as "from foo import *" on the outside; no because "import *" isn't allowed today either).

Yes, "from . import <whatever>" has the exact same meaning as spelling out the corresponding absolute module path after "from". --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)