C-style static variables in Python?

Paul McGuire ptmcg at austin.rr.com
Fri Apr 2 13:28:13 EDT 2010


On Apr 1, 5:34 pm, kj <no.em... at please.post> wrote:
> When coding C I have often found static local variables useful for
> doing once-only run-time initializations.  For example:
>

Here is a decorator to make a function self-aware, giving it a "this"
variable that points to itself, which you could then initialize from
outside with static flags or values:

from functools import wraps

def self_aware(fn):
    @wraps(fn)
    def fn_(*args):
        return fn(*args)
    fn_.__globals__["this"] = fn_
    return fn_

@self_aware
def foo():
    this.counter += 1
    print this.counter

foo.counter = 0

foo()
foo()
foo()


Prints:

1
2
3

-- Paul



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