[Python-Dev] Re: closure semantics

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Oct 22 19:59:05 EDT 2003


> I am currently working on implementing an algorithm with the following 
> properties:
>  - It is an algorithm, not a data structure; that is, you run it,
>    it returns an answer, and it doesn't leave any persistent state
>    afterwards.
>  - It is sufficiently complex that I prefer to break it into several
>    different functions or methods.
>  - These functions or methods need to share various state variables.
> 
> If I implement it as a collection of separate functions, then there's a 
> lot of unnecessary code complexity involved in passing the state 
> variables from one function to the next, returning the changes to the 
> variables, etc.  Also, it doesn't present a modular interface to the 
> rest of the project -- code outside this algorithm is not prevented from 
> calling the internal subroutines of the algorithm.
> 
> If I implement it as a collection of methods of an object, I then have 
> to include a separate function which creates an instance of the object 
> and immediately destroys it.  This seems clumsy and also doesn't fit 
> with my intuition about what objects are for (representing persistent 
> structure).  Also, again, modularity is violated -- outside code should 
> not be making instances of this object or accessing its methods.
> 
> What I would like to do is to make an outer function, which sets up the 
> state variables, defines inner functions, and then calls those 
> functions.  Currently, this sort of works: most of the state variables 
> consist of mutable objects, so I can mutate them without rebinding them.  
> But some of the state is immutable (in this case, an int) so I need to 
> somehow encapsulate it in mutable objects, which is again clumsy.
> Write access to outer scopes would let me avoid this encapsulation 
> problem.

I know the problem, I've dealt with this many times.  Personally I
would much rather define a class than a bunch of nested functions.
I'd have a separate master function that creates the instance, calls
the main computation, and then extracts and returns the result.  Yes,
the class may be accessible at the toplevel in the module.  I don't
care: I just add a comment explaining that it's not part of the API,
or give it a name starting with "_".

My problem with the nested functions is that it is much harder to get
a grasp of what the shared state is -- any local variable in the outer
function *could* be part of the shared state, and the only way to tell
for sure is by inspecting all the subfunctions.  With the class,
there's a strong convention that all state is initialized in
__init__(), so __init__() is self-documenting.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)



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