Some language proposals.

Antoon Pardon apardon at forel.vub.ac.be
Tue Feb 24 10:53:42 EST 2004


I'm rather new at this, so I don't know how I should
introduce this, nor whether these ideas are worth much
but here goes.

What I would like to change is access to variables on
an intermediate scope. Given the following example

def fun_1()

  a = some_value

  def fun_2()

    # a is never the one above.
    # on the left side of a statement.


The solution that I heard proposed was to use
a mutable variable. Something like


def fun_1():

  a = [some_value]

  def fun_2();

    a[0] = new_value
    


And of course if you had a number of such variables
you could group then in an object


def fun_1():

  class var_1:
    pass

  var_1.a = some_value
  var_1.b = a_value_too

  def fun_2():

    var_1.a = new_value
    var_1.b = next_value


Now my idea would be to look at the local variables in
a function like member variables of an object so that
you could write


def fun_1():

  a = some_value
  b = a_value_too

  def fun_2():

    fun_1.a = new_value
    fun_1.b = next_value


This could maybe even extended further is seeing functions
like some kind of module which would allow something like
the following


def fun_1():

  a = some_value
  b = a_value_too
      
  def fun_2():

    from fun_1 import a, b

    a = new_value
    b = next_value


What do people think about this?
As far as I know the proposal doesn't break existing
code and seems in the spirit of python.


On a side note, what would people think about the idea of
a from ... import ... statement usable on any object? So
that we could do:

class A:
  pass

A.a = ...
A.b = ...

from A import a, b

# from here a and be refer to A.a and A.b

-- 
Antoon Pardon



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