[Python-Dev] LOAD_NAME & classes

[Greg Ewing]

Tim Peters <tim.one@comcast.net>:

> Lexical scoping doesn't come naturally except to
> born Schemers, and indeed didn't come naturally to language designers either
> (e.g., early LISPs all had dynamic scoping).

I doubt whether the early designers of Lisp explicitly designed
it to have dynamic scoping. Coming from lambda calculus, they
were probably *thinking* of lexical scoping; it's just that
the implementation they chose had some unfortunate side effects.

So, I conjecture that the *idea* of lexical scoping comes
naturally enough, but a correct implementation of it doesn't. :-)

By the way, even in dynamically scoped Lisp, there's no
equivalent of an UnboundLocalError -- to get a local variable
at all, you have to bind some initial value to it. So, using
Guido's terminology, early Lisp had dynamic scoping, but not
dynamic lookup. Confused enough yet?-)

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
University of Canterbury,	   | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a	  |
Christchurch, New Zealand	   | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc.  |
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