Optional parameter object re-used when instantiating multiple objects

[Jeremiah Dodds]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 8:58 PM, alex23 <wuwei23 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Nov 20, 10:14 am, Aaron Brady <castiro... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If you had a menu in a browser interface that had the items, say,
> > 'Stop' and 'Reload', what would you expect to happen if you clicked on
> > them?
>
> If you had a keyword called 'def', which defined functions, would you
> expect it to define said functions when it executed, or on each
> function call?
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>


I think that most of the issue here stems from people not understanding the
"quirks" of "variable assignment" in python, not so much expecting the def
statement to get re-evaluated every time a function is called.

I'm willing to bet that people surprised by the behavior of def are also
surprised by:
a = [1,2,3]
b = a
b.append(4)
a
[1,2,3,4]

compared to:
a = 4
b = a
b = 5
a
4

This makes sense if you've read (and understood!) the docs, or if you're
familiar with other programming languages that have similar behavior, but a
lot of people learn python as a first language these days - and a lot of
those people learn it  largely by playing around, not by studying the
documentation. I can definitely see how the behavior could be confusing to a
newcomer.
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