Omission of imports

[jonas-schulze]

Use Case 1: import all exported names except a few

Currently, the only way around that is to either qualify all uses or to list all names explicitly in a using statement. This becomes cumbersome if the list of names or their uses is long. It would be nice if we could do something like

using Base
hiding Base: pipeline
# or
using Base hiding: pipeline

that imports all symbols from Base but pipeline.

Use Case 2: resolve naming conflicts (edit: resolved)

When there are functions with identical names but different meanings, this would be useful to resolve naming conflicts. Here, I think, the first syntax would be better/clearer as the intent is to hide/un-export a symbol (since using Base is usually already being done implicitly):

using HTML
hiding Base: div

See also https://discourse.julialang.org/t/base-div-vs-html-div-specialize-or-not/47776/17

Edit: There's already a way around that, see #37925 (comment):

using HTML
using HTML: div

[jonas-schulze]

This could also be used to guide package development to not use some expensive method or to pollute the code environment:

module MyModule

using Distributed
hiding Distributed: addprocs

end

This might help developers of MyModule to not call addprocs by accident, and it has the benefit that evenMyModule.addprocs isn't defined.

[JeffBezanson]

using HTML
hiding Base: div

The reverse should already work:

using Base
using HTML: div
div # gives HTML.div

[jonas-schulze]

The reverse should already work:

Nice! That covers the second use case; I've updated the opening summary. I would like to leave the issue open though to see what people think about the first use case.