On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 09:55:53AM -0400, David Mertz wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 9:13 AM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
>
> > The only risk here is if your refactoring does something silly, such as
> > reusing a variable which overrides assignment:
>
> How would you propose to write this code without reusing a variable?
>
> def frobnicate(data):
>     stuff = []
>     for datum in data:
>         f = process_the(data)
>         g = munge_result(f)
>         stuff.append(g)
>     return stuff

Rewrite it in what way? What problem are you trying to solve?

If you just want to "flush" the local variables at the end of each loop
and ensure that they have been deleted, you can explicitly delete them:

    del f, g, datum

If you are talking about the kind of refactoring Chris was talking
about, I don't see any reason, or opportunity, to do that. If anything,
you could reverse the refactoring:

def frobnicate(data):
    stuff = []
    for datum in data:
        stuff.append(munge_result(process_the(datum)))
    return stuff

which leads to the obvious comprehension:

    return [munge_result(process_the(datum)) for datum in data]

which allows us to eliminate the variable re-use:

    return list(map(lambda x: munge_result(process_the(x)), data))


[...]
> Without
> looking at the source code in `process_the()` we have no way of knowing
> whether `f` is being bound to a new object each time or some completely
> different arbitrary action.

That's exactly the situation right now. Functions can perform arbitrary
actions and return the same object each time.

    def process_the(arg):
        print("do something arbitrary")
        return None


--
Steven
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