Avoiding local variable declarations?

[Chris Mellon]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 2:22 PM, dpapathanasiou
<denis.papathanasiou at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have some old Common Lisp functions I'd like to rewrite in Python
> (I'm still new to Python), and one thing I miss is not having to
> declare local variables.
>
> For example, I have this Lisp function:
>
> (defun random-char ()
>  "Generate a random char from one of [0-9][a-z][A-Z]"
>  (if (< 50 (random 100))
>      (code-char (+ (random 10) 48)) ; ascii 48 = 0
>      (code-char (+ (random 26) (if (< 50 (random 100)) 65 97))))) ;
> ascii 65 = A, 97 = a
>
> My Python version looks like this:
>
> def random_char ():
>    '''Generate a random char from one of [0-9][a-z][A-Z]'''
>    if random.randrange(0, 100) > 50:
>        return chr( random.randrange(0, 10) + 48 ) # ascii 48 = 0
>    else:
>        offset = 65 # ascii 65 = A
>        if random.randrange(0, 100) > 50:
>            offset = 97 # ascii 97 = a
>        return chr( random.randrange(0, 26) + offset )
>
> Logically, it's equivalent of the Lisp version.
>
> But is there any way to avoid using the local variable (offset) in the
> Python version?

Any time you port between languages, it's rarely a good idea to just
convert code verbatim. For example:

import random, string
def random_char():
    return random.choice(string.ascii_letters + string.digits)