Closures in python

[Alex Martelli]

nospam wrote:

> JCM wrote:
>>   >>> def foo():
>>   ...   x = [3]
>>   ...   def bar():
>>   ...     x[0] += 1
>>   (...)
>> 
>> This is actually one of my biggest complaints about Python.  I'd like
>> syntactic disambiguation between definition and assignment in order to
>> have control over which scope you're assigning into.
> 
> Maybe Python could be changed to let 'foo.x' inside function foo mean
> the x variable in foo?

That would be backwards-incompatible, since foo.x already means
something -- the attribute x of object foo (yep, functions are objects
and can have attributes), which has no connection whatsoever with
the local variable x inside (some of the potentially many currently
active instances of) functions named foo.


Alex