SciPy/NumPy import guideline

Question

Notice: I checked for duplicate and nothing clearly answers my question. I trust you\'ll let me know if I missed something!

In an effort to clean up my code, I have been

Answer 1

I recommend doing something like

import numpy as np
import scipy as sp

instead. It is always dangerous to do from ... import * especially with large modules such as numpy and scipy. The following illustrates why:

>>> any(['foo'])
True
>>> from scipy import *
>>> any(['foo'])

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
     any(['foo'])
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\numpy\core\fromnumeric.py", line 1575, in any
    return _wrapit(a, 'any', axis, out)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\numpy\core\fromnumeric.py", line 37, in _wrapit
    result = getattr(asarray(obj),method)(*args, **kwds)
TypeError: cannot perform reduce with flexible type

What happens here? The standard python builtin function any is replaced by scipy.any which has different behavior. That might break any code that uses the standard any.