Although 'namespace' may be a misnomer, module interfaces are 'exposed' to the module that imports it - it's not imported a second time into the new 'namespace'. The confusion comes about thinking that modules and classes are related.
When a module is first imported, an instance is created for the module and the public interfaces/variables are exposed to the module that did the import. When another call to import the same module from somewhere else, Python recognizes that the module has already been imported, so it only creates a reference link to the new module that called import. That is why you get the same ID number for the module function calls. It's similar to classes in that Python keeps track of 'instances' of classes as well as 'instances' of modules, the 'class' instance is based upon variables which can be either the same class (think of a call to a function with a class instance as the input) or a new instance (where the same class is reused, but with different values), whereas modules are based upon executable bytecode where there is only one instance at all times during the program execution. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
