Why is mixing 'from x import y' and 'import x' discouraged?

Question

My script contains the following two lines as import-statements:

import os
from os import path

This seems a logical approach for my script: I use os.path very often, so I want to access it as path. On the other side, I need additional methods from os, but very rarely, so it is ok for me to write os.access(...) for example.

Why is this discouraged? pychecker for example complains about this.

Answer 1

It's usually odd to both import a name from a module, and import the whole module. In this case, you are importing a submodule, so it doesn't seem bad, though most people do just use "os.path" in their function calls.

Just because pychecker doesn't like it doesn't mean you can't do it. Turn off that warning.