Thomas Jollans wrote:
I imagine there's a justification for the difference in behaviour to do with the fact that the body of a class is only ever executed once, while the body of a function is executed multiple times.
I suspect there isn't any deep reason for it, rather it's just something that fell out of the implementation, in particular the decision to optimise local variable access in functions but not other scopes. When compiling a function, the compiler needs to know which variables are local so that it can allocate slots for them in the stack frame. But when executing a class body, the locals are kept in a dict and are looked up dynamically. The compiler *could* be made to treat class bodies the same way as functions in this regard, but it would be extra work for little or no benefit. Most code in class bodies just defines new names without referring to anything else in the same scope. -- Greg -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
