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Barry Scott writes:
There are many possible implementation of the late bound idea that could create an object/default expression. But is it reasonable to bother with that added complexity/maintenance burden for a first implementation.
Yes. If you don't do it, you'll have backward compatibility issues or technical debt. I'm not saying that's a compelling argument here, except that one of the main alleged problems is that users don't understand mutable defaults. So adding more and more layers of support for default arguments is making matters worse, I suspect. (Remember, they're going to be reading "arg=None" and "@arg=[]" for a long long time.) This one is Worth Doing Right the first time, I think. And IMO David Mertz is right: doing it right means a more general deferred-evaluation object (not to be confused with Deferreds that need to be queried about their value).
And maybe no one will care enough to ever implement the ability to modify the code of a late bound variables expression as a separate object later.
Hear! Hear! That's exactly how I feel about *this* proposal! With all due respect to Chris and Steve who have done great work advocating, implementing, and clarifying the proposal, IAGNU (I am gonna not use). Too much muscle memory, and more important, existing code whose style I want to be consistent and don't wanna mess with because it works, around "arg=None".