* Benjamin Kaplan:
On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 4:42 PM, Alf P. Steinbach <al...@start.no> wrote:
* Steven D'Aprano:
I feel that there's still something lacking in my understanding though, like
how/where the "really actually just pure local not also global" is defined
for function definition, but it's now just a vague feeling of something
missing, not a feeling of direct contradiction as I had when I believed
local != global.
It's because the only blocks in python that have their own scope are
classes and functions. For loops don't have their own scope- they use
the enclosing one, which in this case is globals.
Thanks, but hey, contradiction: you mention globals as an "enclosing" scope,
i.e. that a module can have a scope, while stating that only classes and
functions have their own scope (so, would a module have it's not own scope?).
I think, having now read up and down and sideways in the docs, that the proper
term in Python is "namespace", and that "scope" in Python refers to where the
names in a namespace are directly accessible, with a special case for classes,
namely that the scope of a class' namespace doesn't penetrate down into function
definitions, hence problem with comprehensions expressed directly in a class
definition. I believe that's a so called language "wart" -- which C++ is full
of, just now discovering some of Python's :-). It's almost like C++'s "most
vexing parse", a natural and apparently meaningful source code construct that
due to the detailed rules turns out to be meaningless. I wish language designers
could be a little less hooked on low level consistency. Because it makes for
high level inconsistency, very difficult to explain without zillions of details.
But anyways, it's starting to make more sense, yes.
Cheers,
- Alf
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