[Python-Dev] LOAD_NAME & classes

[Greg Ewing]

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

> I think McCarthy may be a good source <wink>:
> 
>    http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html

>From there:

   The difficulty was that when an inner recursion occurred, the value of
   car[x] wanted was the outer value, but the inner value was actually
   used. In modern terminology, lexical scoping was wanted, and dynamic
   scoping was obtained.
   ...
   I must confess that I regarded this difficulty as just a bug and
   expressed confidence that Steve Russell would soon fix it.

So it seems I was more or less right -- the semantics they
wanted was lexical scoping, effectively, even if they didn't
explicitly think about it.

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
University of Canterbury,	   | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a	  |
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