lambdas vs functions: a bytecode question

[Fredrik Lundh]

Fernando Perez wrote:

> there are a couple of threads on lambdas today, which got me curious about
> their differences as far as bytecode goes:
>
> planck[~]|2> lf=lambda x: x**2
> planck[~]|3> def ff(x): return x**2
>         |.>
> planck[~]|4> import dis
> planck[~]|5> dis.dis(lf)
>  1           0 LOAD_FAST                0 (x)
>              3 LOAD_CONST               1 (2)
>              6 BINARY_POWER
>              7 RETURN_VALUE
> planck[~]|6> dis.dis(ff)
>  1           0 LOAD_FAST                0 (x)
>              3 LOAD_CONST               1 (2)
>              6 BINARY_POWER
>              7 RETURN_VALUE
>              8 LOAD_CONST               0 (None)
>             11 RETURN_VALUE
>
> Can someone explain to me what the extra two bytecodes at the end of the
> function version (ff) are for?

looks like a buglet in Python 2.3 (and probably in earlier versions).  the code
generator seems to think that it has to be *really* sure that the function cannot
return without returning None.

Python 2.4 doesn't have this "feature":

>>> import dis
>>> f = lambda x: x**2
>>> def g(x): return x**2
...
>>> dis.dis(f)
  1           0 LOAD_FAST                0 (x)
              3 LOAD_CONST               1 (2)
              6 BINARY_POWER
              7 RETURN_VALUE
>>> dis.dis(g)
  1           0 LOAD_FAST                0 (x)
              3 LOAD_CONST               1 (2)
              6 BINARY_POWER
              7 RETURN_VALUE

</F>