Why no warnings when re-assigning builtin names?

[Chris Torek]

(I realize this thread is old.  I have been away for a few weeks.
I read through the whole thread, though, and did not see anyone
bring up this one particular point: there is already a linting
script that handles this.)

>On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 10:52 PM, Gerrat Rickert
><grickert at coldstorage.com> wrote:
>> With surprising regularity, I see program postings (eg. on StackOverflow)
>> from inexperienced Python users accidentally re-assigning built-in names.
>>
>> For example, they'll innocently call some variable, `list', and assign a
>> list of items to it.

In article <mailman.22.1313446504.27778.python-list at python.org>
Chris Angelico  <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>It's actually masking, not reassigning. That may make it easier or
>harder to resolve the issue.
>
>If you want a future directive that deals with it, I'd do it the other
>way - from __future__ import mask_builtin_warning or something - so
>the default remains as it currently is. But this may be a better job
>for a linting script.

The pylint program already does this:

    $ cat shado.py
    "module doc"
    def func(list):
        "func doc"
        return list
    $ pylint shado.py
    ************* Module shado
    W0622:  2:func: Redefining built-in 'list'
    ...
    Your code has been rated at 6.67/10

If your shadowing is done on purpose, you can put in a pylint
comment directive to suppress the warning.

Pylint is the American Express Card of Python coding: "don't leave
$HOME without it!" :-)
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Wind River Systems
Intel require I note that my opinions are not those of WRS or Intel
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