Peter Otten wrote:
LOAD_NAME is pretty dumb, it looks into the local namespace and if that lookup fails falls back to the global namespace. Someone probably thought "I can do better", and reused the static name lookup for nested functions for names that occur only on the right-hand side of assignments in a class.
I doubt that it was a conscious decision -- it just falls out of the way the compiler looks up names in its symbol table. In case 1, the compiler finds the name 'a' in the function's local namespace and generates a LOAD_FAST opcode, because that's what it does for all function-local names. In case 2, it finds it in the local namespace of the class and generates LOAD_NAME, because that's what it does for all class-local names. The weirdness arises because classes make use of vestiges of the old two-namespace system, which bypasses lexical scoping at run time. -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
