On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 5:02 PM, Random832 <random832@fastmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Apr 28, 2017, at 01:30, Chris Angelico wrote:
Nothing whatsoever says that this is a good idea, but it's perfectly legal, because the for loop is defined in terms of assignment. If this were to be accepted (which, fwiw, I'm not actually advocating, but IF), it would also be defined in terms of assignment. You still shouldn't be assigning to arbitrary objects, especially not randomly rebinding module names, but it's easy to grok the assignment equivalence.
What's not clear is when the left side (an object whose attribute/item is being assigned, and the item index) is evaluated, and why this should be different from when default arguments are evaluated.
Now that is a very good, dare I say it, argument. It's easy enough to explain to an expert, but it's not clear to a beginner. Expert explanation (omitting kwargs): def __init__(self, self.spam=[]): is roughly equivalent to: _defaults = ([],) def __init__(*args): self, self.spam = (args + _defaults)[:2] It's pretty straight-forward for default arguments to be evaluated at declaration time, but assignment targets at execution time; but it isn't clear. I was never really in favour of the proposal, but this is a fairly big downside. ChrisA