On Mon, Nov 1, 2021 at 5:15 PM Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>
> On 1/11/21 4:59 am, David Mertz, Ph.D. wrote:
> >      b = b
>
> I don't want to live in a universe where this could be anything
> other than a no-op in Python.
>

Be careful what you say: there are some technicalities. If you mean
that it won't change the behaviour of the object referred to by b,
then I absolutely agree, but there are ways that this can be more than
a no-op. Notably, it has very good meaning as a keyword argument (it
means "pass b along, named b"), and as a function parameter (meaning
"accept b, defaulting to b from the outer scope"); and even as a
stand-alone statement, it isn't technically meaningless (it'll force b
to be a local).

But yes, I agree that I don't want this to force the evaluation of
something, which continues to be called b. Even though that's
technically possible already if you have a weird namespace, I wouldn't
call that a good way to write code.

ChrisA
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