On 9/29/2011 8:00 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
It has in my mind. As Guido noted, default argument *names* refer to ordinary locals, and hence exhibit the same rebinding behaviour as pre-nonlocal closure references (i.e. reassignments don't persist across calls, only mutations do). Since we expressly *don't* want that behaviour, anything directly in the argument list (even after **) would be inappropriate.
/'we'/'I and some of the discussants'/ It has occurred to me that one reason this threads is not getting anywhere very fast is that there are two quite different proposals being intermixed. People interested in and discussing the two different proposals have been talking past each other. One is to reproduce the behavior of defaulted parameters without having the name appear in the signature to produce *read-only* private locals, which amount to private define-time constants. This includes the int=int type speed hack. I think '*, _int=int', with adjustment of introspection, is sufficient. This make '_int' pragmatically constant, while still externally over-rideable for exceptional purposes such as testing or tracing. The other is to introduce something new: private *read-write* closure (persistent) name-value pairs. I agree that such a new thing should not be in the param list between '(' and ')'. -- Terry Jan Reedy