[Tutor] Variable reference

[Peter Otten]

Alan Gauld wrote:

> On 07/07/15 01:18, Danny Yoo wrote:
>> I'd also add that the 'del' statement has near-zero utility.
>>
>> 'del' is a language blemish.  It should not be used by beginners,
>> because it asks them to try to manually manage the lifetime of their
>> variable names.  That's an unreasonable and ridiculous burden.
>> Functions have local variables for a reason.
> 
> I don't know that I'd go that far. There are valid uses for
> it in deleting things from dictionaries and the like.

For dicts and lists a method would work as well. Even now you can write

items.pop(index) # instead of del items[index]
lookup.pop(key) # del lookup[key]

If you find the name pop() random or hard to discover a delete() method 
could be added.

globals().pop("name") # instead of del name in the global namespace
delattr(obj, "name") # del obj.name

For the above the replacement is less elegant, but I don't think it matters 
for a rarely used feature. So for everything but local and nonlocal names 
del is syntactic sugar at best.

> But I agree its not needed very often and can lead to
> users over-managing their data.