I agree that the namespace pollution is a valid bug. It affects “from string import *” and dir(string). Normally, modules either define __all__ listing their exported names, or they are really careful to define non-exported names beginning with underscores (_). Judging by the line “import re as _re”, somebody once tried to use the second technique for the “string” module.

Silent Ghost: perhaps you were thinking of Issue 23883 (adding to __all__ in various modules). This case is the opposite: we want to limit the exported names.