Robert Brown wrote:
You may find the above surprising, but Common Lisp users expect the default argument expression to be evaluated anew when need by a function call:
I find the Lisp approach more reasonable. Also, an argument based on performance for Python's current behavior seems dubious, given the language's other performance robbing design choices.
well, I'd say an argument based on "Common Lisp users" is a lot more dubious ;-)
(and some of us are actually capable of writing pretty fast code in Python. slowing the language down (or crippling it) because some blub programmers screams "bug!" instead of looking things up in the handbook when they stumble upon something they haven't seen before doesn't strike me as a good use of anyone's time.)
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