On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 01:02:15PM -0700, Brendan Barnwell wrote:
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. :-)
It's not so much the single global lookup on each function call as the fact that you can't do that at all :-(
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'len' referenced before assignment
[...]
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.)
Getting actual constants that the interpreter can trust will not change is likely to be a much bigger language change than taking advantage of existing mechanisms that already exist in functions, with perhaps a little extra work, to get per function local static storage.
But even if we did have actual constants, how does that help get static *variables*, you know, things that aren't constant but can vary?