Question

What’s the rationale behind not allowing * in relative imports? e.g.

from ..new_tool import *

or doing a relative import directly:

import ..new_tool

Answer 1

The reason the latter is prohibited is that ..new_tool is not usable in an expression (PEP 328):

The reason import .foo is prohibited
is because after

    import XXX.YYY.ZZZ

then XXX.YYY.ZZZ is usable in an
expression. But

    .moduleY

is not usable in an
expression.

Since *-imports should only ever be a quick hack while in development, I suspect the functionality for relative *-imports was left out because it’s not necessary.