'from X import a' versus 'import X; X.a'

Question

I\'ve seen some Python programmers use the following style fairly consistently (we\'ll call it style 1):

import some_module
# Use some_module.some_identifier in          


        

Answer 1

With the existence of the following syntax:

import some_other_module as some_module

the maintainability argument of style 2 is no longer relevant.

I tend to use style 1. Normally, I find that I explicitly reference the imported package name only a few times in a typical Python program. Everything else is methods on the object, which of course don't need to reference the imported package.