[Python-Dev] q about default args

[Eric S. Raymond]

Andrew P. Lentvorski <bsder@mail.allcaps.org>:
> > Among other things, because that choice (what old LISP hackers like me
> > call `dynamic scoping') turns out to be far more difficult to model
> > mentally than Python's lexical scoping.
> 
> That statement sounds like someone spent a lot of time doing research on
> it.  Is there a reference I could go look up?

It's sort of a folk theorem derived from painful experience.  Nobody 
has proposed a new LISP dialect with lexical scoping since the mid-1980s.
Scheme and Common LISP, both lexically scoped, pretty much settled the
controversy.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>