Python-newbie mistakes

Looking back at the code I wrote for the last few posts I realized I made a couple of rookie mistakes. Here they are:

1. I called a variable "range", masking the range() built-in function.

2. I imported norm() and other statistical functions as:

from scipy.stats import norm

This practice is frowned upon, since it might introduce name conflicts. In a longer piece of code, norm() could refer to a normal distribution (in scipy.stats) or to the function used to compute the norm of a vector (in numpy.linalg). As the Zen of Python suggests, "Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!". This is the pythonic way of proceeding:

from scipy import stats

# and then uses stats.norm() for normal distributions

from numpy import linalg

# and linalg.norm() form vector norms