"Dima Dorfman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Both languages compile all three functions (f and the two versions of > g) once and choose which g to return at run-time.
*If* OCaml or any other 'other' language compiles the two versions of g to the final and complete functions that get returned (but I don't know if that is so for OCaml or and other appropriate 'other'), then it does something different from and less flexible than Python. > You can see this in Python by examining the code object for f: > > >>> f.func_code.co_consts > (None, 0, <code object g at 1c8120, file "<stdin>", line 3>, > <code object g at 1cd1a0, file "<stdin>", line 6>) It is important that these are code objects, not function objects. > The last two elements are the variants of g. At run-time, one of them > is loaded, made into a real function, and returned. All defs and > lambdas are compiled only once when the module is loaded even if they > depend on the environment or are referenced dynamically. This is a CPython optimization which, I believe, is not part of the language def itself -- but any sensible computer implementation should do something like it. The final wrapping of the code object by a function object must be done at runtime because the defaulf arg evaluation and enclosing variable capture happen on each call of the outer function and because each call therefore returns a different function object -- though each uses the same code object (or, in the case discussed, one of the same two code objects). Terry J. Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
