[Changing the subject.] [Samuele]
this is a bit OT and too late, but given that our closed over variables are read-only, I'm wondering whether, having a 2nd chance, using cells and following mutations in the enclosing scopes is really worth it, we kind of mimic Scheme and relatives but there outer scope variables are also rebindable. Maybe copying semantics not using cells for our closures would not be too insane, and people would not be burnt by trying things like this:
for msg in msgs: def onClick(e): print msg panel.append(Button(msg,onClick=onClick))
which obviously doesn't do what one could expect today. OTOH as for general mutability, using a mutable object (list,...) would allow for mutability when one really need it (rarely).
It was done this way because not everybody agreed that closed-over variables should be read-only, and the current semantics allow us to make them writable (as in Scheme, I suppose?) if we can agree on a syntax to declare an "intermediate scope" global. Maybe "global x in f" would work? def outer(): x = 1 def intermediate(): x = 2 def inner(): global x in outer x = 42 inner() print x # prints 2 intermediate() print x # prints 42 --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)