At 00:43 22.10.2003 +0200, Samuele Pedroni wrote:
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).
of course OTOH cells make it easier to cope with recursive references: def g(): def f(x): ... f refers to f ... return f but this seem more an implementation detail, although not using cells would make this rather trickier to support.