And again, Joshua's original post is not available from my provider. Joshua, I suspect that something about your post is being seen as spam and dropped by at least some providers.
On Wed, 12 Sep 2012 08:52:10 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 8:48 AM, Joshua Landau > <joshua.landau...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Well, the problem is that a lot of collisions aren't predictable. >> "locals()['foo'] = 2", for example. If it weren't for Python's annoying >> flexibility* I can't see your footnote there, so you may have already covered this, but for the record, what you call Python's "annoying flexibility" is fundamental to Python's programming model and done so for good reasons. The ability to shadow built-ins is, at times, incredibly useful rather than annoying. The world is full of bondage and domination languages that strongly restrict what you can do. Python doesn't need to be another one of them. Python's optimizing compiler, PyPy, is able to optimize code very well without such restrictions. >> I would definitely do something very close to what you >> suggest. Remember that "locals()" isn't Python's only introspection >> tool. How about "from foo import *"? I wouldn't call "import *" an introspection tool. At least, no more so than print. > You're not supposed to mutate locals(), It's not so much you're not allowed to do it, but that the result of making changes to locals() inside a function is implementation dependent: CPython 2: writing to the dict returned by locals() will work, but the changes will not be reflected in the actual local variables, except under very restricted circumstances; CPython 3: those restricted circumstances that allowed writes to locals() to modify local variables are now SyntaxErrors; Stackless: presumably the exact same behaviour as CPython (since Stackless is a fork, not a re-implementation); Jython: the same as CPython; IronPython: writes to locals() will modify the corresponding local variable. Outside of a function, locals() returns globals() and writes will always modify the global variable (this is a language guarantee). > but I suppose globals() works the same way. > > Inline functions? I like this idea. I tend to want them in pretty much > any language I write in. What do you mean by in-line functions? If you mean what you literally say, I would answer that Python has that with lambda. But I guess you probably mean something more like macros. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
