Feature request: Selective imports

[gopherbot]

by kirklin.mcdonald:

It would be nice to be able to cherry-pick symbols from a package to use by 
their unqualified names. To steal the syntax used by D for this purpose, we 
would have:

import "fmt" : Printf

With this, Printf would become a name within the file's namespace referring 
to fmt.Printf. The import would not insert any other names into the file's 
namespace (not even fmt).

[gopherbot]

Comment 1 by kirklin.mcdonald:

I should add that the thing after the colon would be a comma-separated list of 
identifiers, as in:
import "fmt" : Printf, Println, Sprintf

[rsc]

Comment 2:

Labels changed: added language-change.

Status changed to Thinking.

[rsc]

Comment 3:

It's worth noting that this breaks the assumptions laid out in
http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#Names
For example, once.Do is a good name; Do is not.

[robpike]

Comment 4:

Status changed to WontFix.