On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 6:05 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
All a "persistent state" proposal would do is create an alternative to the default argument hack that doesn't suffer from the same problems:
def do_and_remember(val, verbose=False, **, mem=collections.Counter()): result = do_something(val) mem[val] += 1 if verbose: print('Done {} times for {!r}'.format(_mem[val], val))
As yet another shade for this particular bikeshed, this one just occurred to me: def do_and_remember(val, verbose=False): @def mem=collections.Counter() result = do_something(val) mem[val] += 1 if verbose: print('Done {} times for {!r}'.format(_mem[val], val)) The @def ("at def") statement is just a new flavour of the same proposal that has been made many times before: a way to indicate that a simple assignment statement should be executed once at function definition time rather than repeatedly on every call to the function. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia