help on ultra newbie program please

[Andrew Walkingshaw]

In article <75aza.123981$3n5.27539 at news2.central.cox.net>, Steve Holden wrote:
[initializing variables]
> That seems a bit strange (though I cannot claim to b e the universal
> arbitrator of what's strange and what's not). You seem to be saying that, to
> avoid AttributeError exceptions due to not having initialized your variables
> before you use them, you initialize them at the start of your code.

That wasn't what I meant, really; it's kind of imprecise what I did
mean, which is making it clear to me that I was thinking fuzzily at the
time, but the kind of thing I mean is something like:

def dbrent(f, df, ax, bx, cx, tol = 0.001, maxiter = 100,
           zeps=1e-10, fuzz=1e-10):
    """ Brent line search using derivatives. """

    a = b = d = d1 = d2 = du = dv = dx = dw = e = 0.0

... etc ...

All these get clobbered almost immediately - they're all
temporary variables - but it seemed useful to me, optically,
to list what the temporary variables *were* in this function "up front".
This is probably bad programming practice - I'm more than
willing to listen to the assembled wisdom on this.

I'm certainly not talking about defining a whole stack of variables in
global scope, or anything else equally bizarre - that seems to me to be 
more likely to cause a whole lot of bugs, rather than prevent them.

My apologies for any confusion,
- Andrew

-- 
Andrew Walkingshaw | andrew-usenet at lexical.org.uk