Death to tuples!

[Antoon Pardon]

On 2005-12-01, Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote:
> Antoon Pardon <apardon at forel.vub.ac.be> writes:
>> On 2005-12-01, Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote:
>>> Antoon Pardon <apardon at forel.vub.ac.be> writes:
>>>> I know what happens, I would like to know, why they made this choice.
>>>> One could argue that the expression for the default argument belongs
>>>> to the code for the function and thus should be executed at call time.
>>>> Not at definion time. Just as other expressions in the function are
>>>> not evaluated at definition time.
>>>
>>> The idiom to get a default argument evaluated at call time with the
>>> current behavior is:
>>>
>>>         def f(arg = None):
>>>             if arg is None:
>>>                arg = BuildArg()
>>>
>>> What's the idiom to get a default argument evaluated at definition
>>> time if it were as you suggested?
>>
>> Well there are two possibilities I can think of:
>>
>> 1)
>>   arg_default = ...
>>   def f(arg = arg_default):
>>      ...
>
> Yuch. Mostly because it doesn't work:
>
> arg_default = ...
> def f(arg = arg_default):
> ...
>
> arg_default = ...
> def g(arg = arg_default):
>
> That one looks like an accident waiting to happen.

It's not because accidents can happen, that it doesn't work.
IMO that accidents can happen here is because python
doesn't allow a name to be marked as a constant or unreboundable.

> This may not have been the reason it was done in the first place, but
> this loss of functionality would seem to justify the current behavior.
>
> And, just for fun:
>
> def setdefaults(**defaults):
>     def maker(func):
>         def called(*args, **kwds):
>             defaults.update(kwds)
>             func(*args, **defaults)
>         return called
>     return maker

So it seems that with a decorator there would be no loss of
functionality.

-- 
Antoon Pardon