Is this a bug, or is it me?

[cokofreedom at gmail.com]

On Jan 17, 4:59 pm, "Neil Cerutti" <mr.ceru... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 17, 2008 10:44 AM, Hrvoje Niksic <hnik... at xemacs.org> wrote:
>
> > "Neil Cerutti" <mr.ceru... at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > > You cannot access a class's class variables in it's class-statement
> > > scope, since the name of the type is not bound until after the class
> > > statement is completed.
>
> > But they are still available as locals, so you can access them using
> > their names, like this:
>
> > >>> class C:
> > ...   a = 1
> > ...   b = 2
> > ...   print a+b
> > ...
> > 3
>
> Thanks! I had never tried that before. That actually solved my default
> method argument problem.
>
>
>
> > The question is, why doesn't the OP's code snippet work?  It seems
> > that the generator expression can't read the surrounding locals().
> > But when you change the generator expression to a list comprehension
> > using a pair of [] around it, it starts working.  Compare:
>
> > class C(object):
> >     d = {}
> >     for a in 1, 2, 3:
> >         ignore = list((a, b) for b in (4, 5, 6))
>
> > Traceback (most recent call last):
> >   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> >   File "<stdin>", line 4, in C
> >   File "<stdin>", line 4, in <genexpr>
> > NameError: global name 'a' is not defined
>
> > with:
>
> > class C(object):
> >     d = {}
> >     for a in 1, 2, 3:
> >         ignore = [(a, b) for b in (4, 5, 6)]
>
> > It seems that generator expressions and list comprehensions have
> > subtly different scoping rules.  Whether this is a bug or not is a
> > good question.
>
> Generator expressions, unlike list comprehensions, have their own
> scope so that they don't "leak" names to the enclosing scope. The
> Python rule forbidding access to the locals of enclosing scopes is
> preventing the class names from working in the generator expression.
>
> --
> Neil Cerutti <mr.cerutti+pyt... at gmail.com>

Ah, that explains why my random suggestion worked but was not
helpful :) I feel like I am learning a lot today!