On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 6:04 AM Brendan Barnwell
On 2021-05-27 12:33, Chris Angelico wrote:
With statics, you could write it like this:
def merge_shortest(things): static len=len ...
Simple. Easy. Reliable. (And this usage would work with pretty much any of the defined semantics.) There's no more confusion.
You can already do that:
def merge_shortest(things): len=len ...
Yes, it does require a single global lookup on each function call, but if that's really a bottleneck for you I don't think there's much hope. :-)
Hmmmmmmmm.... let's see.
def merge_shortest(things): ... len=len ... ... ... merge_shortest([]) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "<stdin>", line 2, in merge_shortest UnboundLocalError: local variable 'len' referenced before assignment
There are languages in which you're allowed to do this (using a name in an initializer to fetch from a parent scope), but Python isn't one of them. At best, you could write "_len=len", but then you have to rewrite the function body to use _len, leaving the question of "why is this _len and not len?" for every future maintainer. Since a static declaration is evaluated at function definition time (just like a default argument is), this problem doesn't come up, because the local name "len" won't exist at that point.
Even something like a way of specifying constants (which has been proposed in another thread) would be better to my eye. That would let certain variables be marked as "safe" so that they could always be looked up fast because we'd be sure they're never going to change.
Question: When does this constant get looked up?
def merge_shortest(things): constant len=len ...
Is it looked up as the function begins execution, or when the function is defined? How much are you going to assume that it won't change?
Sorry, I was a bit vague there. What I was envisioning is that you would specify len as a constant at the GLOBAL level, meaning that all functions in the module could always assume it referred to the same thing. (It's true this might require something different from what was proposed in the other thread about constants.)
Gotcha, gotcha. I think module-level constants could *also* be useful, but they're orthogonal to this proposal. Unless it's a compile-time constant (so, as the module gets imported, all references to "len" become LOAD_CONST of whatever object was in the builtins at that point), I doubt it would have the same performance benefits, and it obviously couldn't handle the mutable statics use-case. I think there are very good use-cases for module-level constants, but the trouble is, there are so many variants of the idea and so many not-quite-overlapping purposes that they can be put to :) ChrisA