On Wednesday 22 October 2003 01:40, Guido van Rossum wrote: ...
Eek. Global statement inside flow control should be deprecated, not abused to show that global is evil. :-)
OK, let's (deprecate them), shall we...?
Plus. EVERY newbie makes the mistake of taking "global" to mean "for ALL modules" rather than "for THIS module",
Only if they've been exposed to languages that have such globals.
Actually, I've seen that happen to complete newbies too. "global" is a VERY strong word -- or at least perceived as such.
uselessly using global in toplevel,
Which the parser should reject.
Again: can we do that in 2.4?
I think it's not unreasonable to want to replace global with attribute assignment of *something*. I don't think that "something" should have to be imported before you can use it; I don't even think it deserves to have leading and trailing double underscores.
Using attribute assignment is my main drive here. I was doing it via import only to be able to experiment with that in today's Python;-).
Walter suggested 'global.x = 23' which looks reasonable; unfortunately my parser can't do this without removing the existing global statement from the Grammar: after seeing the token 'global' it must be able to make a decision about whether to expand this to a global statement or an assignment without peeking ahead, and that's impossible.
So it can't be global, as it must stay a keyword for backwards compatibility at least until 3.0. What about: this_module current_module sys.modules[__name__] [[hmmm this DOES work today, but...;-)]] __module__ ...?
If we removed global from the language, how would you spell assignment to a variable in an outer function scope? Remember, you can *not* use 'outer.x' because that already refers to a function attribute.
scope(outer).x , making 'scope' a suitable built-in factory function. I do think this deserves a built-in. If we have this, maybe scope could also be reused as e.g. scope(global).x = 23 ? I think the reserved keyword 'global' SHOULD give the parser no problem in this one specific use (but, I'm guessing...!). Alex