[issue22571] Remove import * recommendations and examples in doc?

[Raymond Hettinger]

Raymond Hettinger added the comment:

Many of these (such as collections, collections.abc, decimal, and itertools) use import * as part of the doctest setup and are not part of the generated page shown to users.

Also, I don't think you should be aggressive about removing the other example that are visible users.   The "import *" construct is part of the language and will be encountered occasionally.

For similar reasons, the decimal module was specifically designed for be easily usable with "import *" because of the numerous exceptions and rounding flags and constants.

There are also some examples such the one in cmd.rst that I put there on-purpose.  Changing it would distract from the focus of the example.

With respect to Tkinter (and other gui toolkits as well), I believe that "import *" is a standard or common practice, in part because there are so many widget names names and widget options.  Changing the example might make it more pep8-ish but would result in a good deal of clutter that isn't the normal practice.


>  Should we finish the job?  Or leave the issue to
> individual chapter authors?

I vote for leaving any changes to the chapter authors who are in a better position to know that they were trying to communicate or who were just setting up the doctests.   As discussed above some of the import * are there for a reason.

We really need to start thinking of PEP 8 as something we do to our own code rather than something that gets inflicted on other people's code.

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assignee: docs at python -> rhettinger
nosy: +rhettinger

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