'global' is an ugly wart, to all intents and purposes working "as if" it was a declaration. If I had to vote about the one worst formal defect of Python, it would surely be 'global'.
Fortunately, it's reasonably easy to avoid the ugliness, by avoiding
rebinding (within functions) global variables, which tend to be easy.
Hear, hear! And if I could write "gbls = namespace(globals())" in order to deal with those rare cases where I *do* need to rebind globals, all uses of the keyword could be handled nicely, while entirely eliminating the need for the keyword itself.
*ONLY* that tiny subset of such typos which happened on the left of a
plain '=' (since all others, happening on the RIGHT of an '=' or on the
left of an _augmented_ '=', were already caught), and ONLY regarding
barenames (such typos on any but the rightmost component of compound
names were already caught intrinsically, and catching those on the
rightmost component is trivially easier than introducing a {YECCCCHH}
'vars' as you so stubbornly insist)...
Would you be as violently opposed to a 'rebinding' augmented assignment operator?
Since bare assignment statements essentially serve the purpose of variable declarations, I sometimes *would* like a way to say 'bind this existing name to something different'. A rebinding operation would provide a way to make that intention explicit, without cluttering the language with useless declarations.
In addition to detecting typos in local variable names, it would *also* address the problem of detecting typos in the right-most name in a compound name (e.g. making a habit of always using the rebinding operator when modifying member variables outside of __init__ would make it easier to avoid inadvertently creating a new instance variable instead of modifying an existing one)
With a rebinding operator available, the only typos left to slip through the net are those which match an existing visible name and those where the programmer has explicitly requested an unconditional name binding by using '=' and then made a typo on the left hand side.
Cheers,
Nick.
Did I mention the possible incidental benefit of reducing the whinging about the lack of variable declarations?
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Nick Coghlan | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Brisbane, Australia
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http://boredomandlaziness.skystorm.net
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