Question

Well, this query struck my mind when someone pointed out to me that importing a package using import package gives more code readability. Is this actually true? I mean when using this statement as compared to from package import x, y, z, isn’t there any overhead of importing the entire package?

Answer 1

I don’t expect any performance difference. Whole package will be loaded anyway.

For example:

# load dirname() function from os.path module
>>> from os.path import dirname

#the os.path.basename() was not imported
>>> basename('/foo/bar.txt')
NameError: name 'basename' is not defined

# however, basename() is already available anyway:
dirname.__globals__['basename']('/foo/bar.txt')