[Python-ideas] stealing "var" from javascript

[Neil Toronto]

Erick Tryzelaar wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 8:47 AM, Mathias Panzenböck
> <grosser.meister.morti at gmx.net> wrote:
>> It would also help with local functions!
>>
>>  def foo():
>>     var x = 1
>>
>>     def bar(y):
>>        x += y * 2
>>
>>     bar(55)
> 
> They've added something to py3k to handle this:
> 
> def foo():
>   x = 1
> 
>   def bar(y):
>     nonlocal x
>     x += y * 2
> 
>   bar(55)

Indeed. Funny enough, it was a similar plea for a variable declaration 
keyword (mine, in fact) that was the final straw. Thus, after a bit of 
bike shedding and collision checking on the keyword spelling, "nonlocal" 
was born...

Since the foremost use case has been handled, I expect a "var" proposal 
to go nowhere. The rationale, IIRC, is rather compression-oriented: in a 
language where only functions define inner scopes, it's far more likely 
that an assignment is meant to refer to the current scope than an outer 
scope. A declaration keyword is provided for the unlikely case, leaving 
the likely case declaration-free.

In general, the more compressed your code is, the harder it is to detect 
encoding errors. In this case, Python's designers decided on compression 
over easy error detection.

Neil