James Y Knight wrote:
If it was possible to assign to a variable to a variable bound outside your function, but still in your lexical scope, I think it would fix this issue. That's always something I've thought should be possible, anyways. I propose to make it possible via a declaration similar to 'global'.
E.g. (stupid example, but it demonstrates the syntax): def f(): count = 0 def addCount(): lexical count count += 1 assert count == 0 addCount() assert count == 1
It strikes me that with something like this lexical declaration, we could abuse decorators as per Carl Banks's recipe[1] to get the equivalent of thunks: def withfile(filename, mode='r'): def _(func): f = open(filename, mode) try: func(f) finally: f.close() return _ and used like: line = None @withfile("readme.txt") def print_readme(fileobj): lexical line for line in fileobj: print line print "last line:" line As the recipe notes, the main difference between print_readme and a real "code block" is that print_readme doesn't have access to the lexical scope. Something like James's suggestion would solve this problem. One advantage I see of this route (i.e. using defs + lexical scoping instead of new syntactic support) is that because we're using a normal function, the parameter list is not an issue -- arguments to the "thunk" are bound to names just as they are in any other function. The big disadvantage I see is that my normal expectations for decorators are wrong here -- after the decorator is applied print_readme is set to None, not a new callable object. Guess I'm still riding the fence. ;-) STeVe [1]http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/391199 -- You can wordify anything if you just verb it. --- Bucky Katt, Get Fuzzy