Functions continuing to ru after returning something?

[Stefan Schwarzer]

Hi,

On 2010-08-31 02:05, Bradley Hintze wrote:
> I may be having a brain fart, but is it at all possible to have a
> function first return a value then continue its calculation. Like this
> simple example:
> 
> my_var = 5
> def my_function():
>     return my_var
>     my_var +=1
> 
> This obviously won't work as written but is there a cleaver way around this.

At least in CPython 2.6.5 the above code results in

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test.py", line 7, in <module>
    my_function()
  File "test.py", line 3, in my_function
    return my_var
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'my_var' referenced before assignment

as soon as the function is called.

If you want to have the global my_var modified, you need
a "global my_var" statement in the function body.

Stefan