a = b = 1 just syntactic sugar?

[junk]

Hey, thanks!  That's a great idea!

Ed Avis wrote:

>junk <junk at geekabytes.net> writes:
>
>  
>
>>If you care, I wrote a little function that will return the current 
>>function within a block.  This means, you can have anonymous recursive 
>>functions like this:
>>
>>import selfref
>>factorial = lambda x: ((x==0)*1) or (x * selfref.myself(x-1))
>>
>>Here is the code:
>>
>>def myself(*args):
>>   prevFrame = sys._getframe(1)
>>   myOwnCode = prevFrame.f_code
>>   myOwnFuncObj = new.function(myOwnCode, globals())
>>   return myOwnFuncObj(*args)
>>
>>The only thing this doesn't do is to capture default arguments!!!
>>    
>>
>
>I suppose you could generalize it to not only the containing function
>but ones above that, for defining mutually recursive functions.
>Suppose 'myself2' is like 'myself' except it does sys._getframe(2).
>
>   f = lambda x: ((x==0)*1) or (1 + (lambda y: selfref.myself2(y-2))(x))
>
>Sorry that it's too late at night for me to think up a more useful
>example of mutual recursion :-P.
>
>It would be neater if the language supported this directly, like ML's
>'fun'.  (ML has 'fn x => x + 1' for defining a simple function, and
>'fun f x => 1 + f (x-1)' for giving a name to the function so it can
>call itself recursively.  Python's 'lambda' is like 'fn' but there is
>no equivalent of 'fun'.)  But I don't hold out much hope :-(.
>
>  
>