Class Variable Access and Assignment

[Stefan Arentz]

Antoon Pardon <apardon at forel.vub.ac.be> writes:

...

> Fine, we have the code:
> 
>   b.a += 2
> 
> We found the class variable, because there is no instance variable,
> then why is the class variable not incremented by two now?

Because it really is executed as:

 b.a = b.a + 2

  1. get 't'b.a and store it in a temporary 't' (found the instance)
  2. add 2 to 't'
  3. store 't' in 'b.a'

The last operation stores it into an instance variable.

> 
> > Remember, Python is a dynamic language.
> 
> So? Python being a dynamic language doesn't prevent the following to fail:
> 
> >>> a=1
> >>> def f():
> ...   a += 2
> ... 
> >>> f()
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
>   File "<stdin>", line 2, in f
> UnboundLocalError: local variable 'a' referenced before assignment

See the 'global' keyword.

 s.