On 04/04/2014 19:55, Ian Kelly wrote:
On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 12:37 PM, Rotwang <sg...@hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
Hi all. I thought I had a pretty good grasp of Python's scoping rules, but
today I noticed something that I don't understand. Can anyone explain to me
why this happens?

x = 'global'
def f1():
     x = 'local'
     class C:
         y = x
     return C.y

def f2():
     x = 'local'
     class C:
         x = x
     return C.x

f1()
'local'
f2()
'global'

Start by comparing the disassembly of the two class bodies:

dis.dis(f1.__code__.co_consts[2])
   3           0 LOAD_NAME                0 (__name__)
               3 STORE_NAME               1 (__module__)
               6 LOAD_CONST               0 ('f1.<locals>.C')
               9 STORE_NAME               2 (__qualname__)

   4          12 LOAD_CLASSDEREF          0 (x)
              15 STORE_NAME               3 (y)
              18 LOAD_CONST               1 (None)
              21 RETURN_VALUE
dis.dis(f2.__code__.co_consts[2])
   3           0 LOAD_NAME                0 (__name__)
               3 STORE_NAME               1 (__module__)
               6 LOAD_CONST               0 ('f2.<locals>.C')
               9 STORE_NAME               2 (__qualname__)

   4          12 LOAD_NAME                3 (x)
              15 STORE_NAME               3 (x)
              18 LOAD_CONST               1 (None)
              21 RETURN_VALUE

The only significant difference is that the first uses
LOAD_CLASSDEREF, which I guess is the class version of LOAD_DEREF for
loading values from closures, at line 4 whereas the second uses
LOAD_NAME.  So the first one knows about the x in the nonlocal scope,
whereas the second does not and just loads the global (since x doesn't
yet exist in the locals dict).

Now why doesn't the second version also use LOAD_CLASSDEREF?  My guess
is because it's the name of a local; if it were referenced a second
time in the class then the second LOAD_CLASSDEREF would again get the
x from the nonlocal scope, which would be incorrect.

Thanks (sorry for the slow reply, I've had a busy few days).

For anyone who's interested, I also found an interesting discussion of the above in the following thread:

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2002-April/023427.html
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