Anyone ever overridden a builtin by accident?

[Christopher Blunck]

Argh.  Hate it when I do this....


On Sat, 06 Sep 2003 20:22:19 -0700, John Ladasky wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> Just wanted to share a frustrating programming bug that, when I
> figured it out, made me gasp, and then laugh.
> 
> In one of my programs I wrote...
> 
> c = max(a,b)
> 
> ...and I was getting the most annoying, frustrating error message: 
> "type 'int' is not callable."
> 
> What the heck?  I wasn't calling an integer, I was calling the
> __builtin__ function, max()!
> 
> I dropped out of my regular editor (SciTE), opened IDLE, and tried
> typing in bits of my code, including the call to max().  Everything
> seemed to work fine.
> 
> Then, I finally spotted the problem.  At the beginning of my program I
> had defined a variable called "max"!  I had overridden the __builtin__
> function by mistake.
> 
> Is there ever a good reason to override something in __builtin__? 
> It's powerful, but potentially quite confusing.  Can the interpreter
> be instructed to give a warning message when you do it?
> 
> Yes indeed, *everything* in Python is an object.  Let the newbie
> beware!
> 
> --
> John J. Ladasky Jr., Ph.D.
> Department of Biology
> Johns Hopkins University
> Baltimore MD 21218
> USA
> Earth