New submission from Jesse Silverman : In section 4.6 of the tutorial, we find: "When a function calls another function, a new local symbol table is created for that call." Now, perhaps because we were just looking at a function that people will often ask you to write both recursively and non-recursively and then ask which one you would use and why...I was thinking "Wait -- when a function calls itself recursively, obviously they need a new local symbol table or local variables won't work??" I may be confused, in which case the doc is fine and I personally need to better understand the moral equivalent of activation record / stack frame in Python. If I am not, given that recursion isn't much more computer science oriented or obscure than Fibonacci sequences, could it not be worth the investment of a few extra words as: "When a function calls another function, or calls itself recursively, a new local symbol table is created for that call." ---------- assignee: docs@python components: Documentation messages: 385800 nosy: docs@python, jessevsilverman priority: normal severity: normal status: open title: tutorial ambiguous about creation of local symbol table for recursive calls versions: Python 3.9 _______________________________________ Python tracker https://bugs.python.org/issue43042 _______________________________________