My scope is broke

[Travis Beaty]

  Hello!

Once upon a time, Dennis Lee Bieber pressed the following keys in quick 
succession ...

>The Apocalypse will NOT be televised... (will that do for the 
>revelation?) <G>
>

Well, we're not missing much.  Knowing my luck, it would be 
pay-per-view, and the wife wouldn't let me press the right buttons ...

>        The "global" keyword is used /inside/ a procedure to signify which 
>variables exist outside of the procedure.
>

Ah ... yes, I had totally misunderstood what "global" does.   I believe 
I have a better grasp of global now.  One quick question about a piece 
of the code that you supplied, however:

> <snip>
>
>s = 0
>def Aglobal():
>        global s
>        s = 132         #this "s" is global from the view point of this
>                        #function
>
Had s not been defined in the outer scope, would the variable s declared 
with global within Aglobal() still be accessible outside the function? 
Or would s now be something like C++'s static int within Aglobal()?

I removed the "global" from my declarations in appvar, because they 
would make no sense, as these declarations were in the outer scope of 
the module.

><snip>
>
>        -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
>
>        The OTHER problem I see is that you are using "from xyz import *" -- 
>this is seldom a recommended action; it makes all "names" in the top 
>level of xyz become names in the top level of the module doing the 
>import.
>
>        "from appvars import *", makes all names local...
>
><mailstash>
>from appvars import *   #makes user_preferences a local name of mailstash
>                        #in effect the name is mailstash.user_preferences
>
Okay, I changed the import line to "import appvars," and made the 
changes in calling the variables that you suggested.  Not surprisingly 
... the fix worked, and I'm up and running.  Thank you!  But, I still 
don't understand *why* the fix worked.  I guess I'll still a little 
unclear on this.  The sole purpose of appvar is to declare variables and 
constants which are global to the entire application.  It does not 
contain any functions or classes.  By importing it with "from appvars 
import *", I thought that I would basically be making a "syntactic 
shortcut," as opposed to repeatedly typing the "appvar." qualifier.  So 
yes, it would be considered local in mailstash, but also local to 
mailstash_gui.tmainform.  But, would these be considered two different 
variables in this case, in two different scopes?  

>
><mailstash_gui.tmainform> #are you sure of the . -- you are defining a
>                        #package mailstash_gui containing a file tmainform?
>
Yes.

mailstash.py
appvars.py
/mailstash_gui
    __init__.py
    tmainform.py

I had intended the package mailstash_gui to contain all the modules that 
contain classes pertaining to the application's GUI  (pyGnome).  Is this 
standard procedure in Python applications?

Once again, thank you for your help, folks.

Travis Beaty
Mason City, Iowa.