from __future__ import *

I was going through a code with the statement "from __future__ import division" and I finally asked the question as to what exactly __future__ is and what the hell is it that we're importing. Turns out when there are backward compatability issues with changes made in a release, the revised function can be called using the above statement and if we simply call the function without the above import statement, we will be using the previous form of the function. Read this and this for a better understanding of what i'm talking about.

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