List comprehension/genexp inconsistency.
J. Cliff Dyer
jcd at sdf.lonestar.org
Tue Mar 20 16:23:22 EDT 2012
One of my coworkers just stumbled across an interesting issue. I'm
hoping someone here can explain why it's happening.
When trying to create a class with a dual-loop generator expression in a
class definition, there is a strange scoping issue where the inner
variable is not found, (but the outer loop variable is found), while a
list comprehension has no problem finding both variables.
Demonstration:
>>> class Spam:
... foo, bar = 4, 4
... baz = dict(((x, y), x+y) for x in range(foo) for y in
range(bar))
...
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "<stdin>", line 3, in Spam
File "<stdin>", line 3, in <genexpr>
NameError: global name 'bar' is not defined
>>> class Eggs(object):
... foo, bar = 4, 4
... baz = dict([((x, y), x+y) for x in range(foo) for y in
range(bar)])
...
>>>
This was discovered in python 2.6. In python 3.2, both versions fail
with the same NameError.
Obviously, this is easy enough to work around. I'm curious though:
What's going on under the hood to cause the nested generator expression
to fail while the list comprehension succeeds?
Cheers,
Cliff
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