Scope confusion...

[Kevin@Cazabon.com]

I had a perplexing problem that turned out to be a scope issue, but I still
can't for the life of me figure out WHY it's behaving like this.  Consider
this minimal example, and the resulting output:

##################
def a(list = []):
    list.append("test")
    return list

def b():
    for i in range(20):
        print a()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    b()
##################

I would expect it to print "['test']" twenty times, correct?  It doesn't.
It prints:

['test']
['test', 'test']
['test', 'test', 'test']
['test', 'test', 'test', 'test']
['test', 'test', 'test', 'test', 'test']
['test', 'test', 'test', 'test', 'test', 'test']
['test', 'test', 'test', 'test', 'test', 'test', 'test']
['test', 'test', 'test', 'test', 'test', 'test', 'test', 'test']
... and so on.

If you modify the definition of b to this, then it works as I'd expect:

def b():
    for i in range(20):
        print a([])

Is there a reason for this I'm missing?  "list" should be a private variable
for function a(), and should be initialized to an empty list each time a()
is called, correct?

What am I missing?  (I'm using ActivePython 2.2.1 build 222)

Kevin.