question about shadowing built-in names

[John Salerno]

I understand that if you reassign a built-in name to your own variable,
such as:

str = 'hello'

then you lose the use of the built-in (in this case str()), but is this
also the case in terms of imported names? For example:

import MySQLdb

db = connect(blah blooh blee)
cursor = db.cursor()

Now, in the above, did I reassign the value of the cursor method, or is
this different?

Actually, now that I think about it, that's not exactly the same because
cursor is a method of a connection object, not simply a function. So I
suppose my real question is, does the 'shadowing' of built-in names also
happen when you import other names, whether they are functions,
methods or whatever else they could be?

Thanks.

[John Salerno]

Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

import MySQLdb

db = connect(blah blooh blee)
Actually, the above has already failed <G> Should be
MySQLdb.connect...

Heh heh, yeah, I totally meant to do that on purpose. ;)

Well, if you have a habit of doing
from module import *
and later rebind one of the imported names...

I see. So doing a regular import <name> statement keeps the namespace
confined to that module, right? So I would be able to create my own
variable with the same name as a name in the imported module, and this
wouldn't be a problem as long as I didn't import with *?