Overriding a global

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 9:14 PM, Jean-Michel Pichavant
<jeanmichel at sequans.com> wrote:
> The problem makes little sense when using names like x or func1. Besides
> namespace issues, naming 2 *different objects* with the same meaningful name
> is usually a bad idea and points the fact that your names are no that
> meaningful.

So... it's a bad idea for me to use 'i' many times in my code, with
the same name having different meanings in different places? In
languages with infinitely-nesting scopes (one of Python's great lacks,
imho), I've often had three different variables with the same names,
all perfectly valid, and all doing what they should. It's not just
loop indices - I used to have a piece of code in which 'res' was a
MySQL resource being processed in a loop, and I had three nested
loops. Each time I referenced 'res', it used the innermost available
resource, which was precisely what I wanted. If I'd arbitrarily had to
guarantee that all variable names were unique, I would have had
completely unnecessary fiddling around.

Python wouldn't let you do that with three nested 'res'es in one
function, but you can perfectly reasonably have a global and a local.
It makes perfect sense... which is a good reason for keeping it legal.

ChrisA