Recursive inner function... How?

[Fredrik Lundh]

hi bjorn,
> > the easiest fix is to do as Guido intended, and move
> > "inner" to the global scope.  you can either move the
> > entire function to the right place, or cheat:
> >
> >     def outer():
> >         global inner
> >         def inner():
> >             inner()
> >         inner()
> >
> >     outer()
>
> It isn't immediately clear to me what is going on though... My guess is that
> the global statement creates an entry in the global dict, and the def inner
> assigns a new value to it... (am I close?)

Close enough: the global statement doesn't modify the
global namespace, it just tells Python's compiler that
"inner" is a global name.

The compiler uses that information to generate the right
bytecode operations: LOAD/STORE_FAST for locals,
LOAD/STORE_GLOBAL for globals.

(this only applies to the code in "outer", though -- inside
"inner", "inner" is a global name...  the recursive call only
works because "outer" creates the global variable before
it makes the call...)

</F>