advice on this little script

[Kent Johnson]

Alex Martelli wrote:
> John Salerno <johnjsal at NOSPAMgmail.com> wrote:
>    ...
> 
>>I think the 'from time import sleep' looks cleaner, because I'm only 
>>taking what I need (is an import any more expensive than this from?),
>>but I also feel like the 'time.sleep' syntax is much more 
>>self-describing and better to read than just 'sleep'.
>>
>>So what do you guys think between these two choices?

I use both fairly interchangeably. When I just need one or two things 
from the module, or if I am going to use something a lot, I use from xx 
import yy.
> 
> 
> I only use the 'from' statement to import specific modules from a
> package, never to import specific objects (functions, classes, or
> whatever) from a module. It scales much better: when reading a long
> module, I _know_ that any barename X always refers to a local,
> nested-scope, or global name, never to something snatched from
> who-recalls-what module -- in the latter case I'll never see a barename,
> but always somemodule.X, and searching for '... import somemodule' will
> immediately tell me where somemodule was coming from (should I need to
> be reminded of that information).

If you use from xx import yy, searching for yy will show you its 
provenance as well.

 From xx import * is evil because it does hide the provenance of names. 
It can also give unexpected results - if xx contains from zz import *, 
then all of the names from zz will also be imported into the module 
importing xx!

Kent