George Sakkis wrote:
Sure they have, and they've solved it (under different names) in plenty of other languages. In python, the only current solution seems to be turning the function into a class (with self) or at least a closure. People have griped about this.
User-defined function attributes is another handy solution.
For What Its Worth, my personal opinion is that having to create an object instead of a function is annoying, but not so bad (or so frequent) that it is worth special syntax.
Function attributes fit the bill really good if writing a class is too much overhead.
To follow up on this, here is a way to get something pretty close to what I wanted. From this... def foo(x): local history = [] history.append(x) To this... def local(**locals): def _local(fn): fn.__dict__.update(locals) return fn return _local @local(history = []) def foo(x): foo.history.append(x) I like this because it keeps history out of the parameter list, and while it's not part of the local namespace, it's readily accessible. Joel