On Sep 24, 9:16 pm, Bruno Desthuilliers <bruno. [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Matthew Woodcraft a écrit : > > One reason for the different syntax is that functions, unlike most > > other objects, know their own names (which can be shown in tracebacks > > and the like). > > Nope. They know *one* of their names - the one they've been given when > first instanciated. Which may or not be the name used to get at them...
That's exactly the point - a function may be given many names through the assignment statement, just like any other data value. However, the *first* name given to a function (the one in the def statement) is special, as that is the name the function knows *itself* by. While a function *can* be treated like any other piece of data once you have a reference to one, the original statement does a lot more than a normal assignment does: - being within the scope of a function significantly alters name binding and lookup - return statements and yield statements are meaningful only within the scope of a function - you can attach decorators to a function definition - you can include a docstring in a function definition For the original poster, I suggest trying some of the other suggestions in this thread, where you skip the def statement and instead look at manipulating standard library functions like math.sin and math.cos. Using a dictionary to select a function to run may be a good trick to illustrate the usefulness of this technique (e.g. passing in a command line argument to choose a function to call to generate a test sequence)
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