[Python-Dev] PEP for Better Control of Nested Lexical Scopes
Jeremy Hylton
jeremy at alum.mit.edu
Fri Feb 24 23:38:26 CET 2006
On 2/24/06, James Y Knight <foom at fuhm.net> wrote:
> On Feb 24, 2006, at 1:54 AM, Greg Ewing wrote:
> > Thomas Wouters wrote:
> >> On Thu, Feb 23, 2006 at 05:25:30PM +1300, Greg Ewing wrote:
> >>
> >>> As an aside, is there any chance that this could be
> >>> changed in 3.0? I.e. have the for-loop create a new
> >>> binding for the loop variable on each iteration.
> >>
> >> You can't do that without introducing a whole new scope
> >> for the body of the 'for' loop,
> >
> > There's no need for that. The new scope need only
> > include the loop variable -- everything else could
> > still refer to the function's main scope.
>
> No, that would be insane. You get the exact same problem, now even
> more confusing:
>
> l=[]
> for x in range(10):
> y = x
> l.append(lambda: (x, y))
>
> print l[0]()
>
> With your suggestion, that would print (0, 9).
>
> Unless python grows a distinction between creating a binding and
> assigning to one as most other languages have, this problem is here
> to stay.
The more practical complaint is that list comprehensions use the same
namespace as the block that contains them. It's much easier to miss
an assignment to, say, i in a list comprehension than it is in a
separate statement in the body of a for loop. Since list comps are
expressions, the only variable at issue is the index variable. It
would be simple to fix by renaming, but I suspect we're stuck with the
current behavior for backwards compatibility reasons.
Jeremy
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