Default scope of variables

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Jul 4, 2013 at 3:32 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> Accidental shadowing can be a problem, but I've never heard of anyone
> saying that they were *forced* to shadow a global they needed access to.
> Just pick a different name.

Here's one example of shadowing that comes from a C++ project at work.
I have a class that represents a database transaction (constructing it
begins a transaction, it has methods for doing queries, and its
destructor rolls back). There's also a class for a subtransation (same
thing, but it uses savepoints within the transaction). So to bracket a
piece of code in a subtransaction, I want to declare a new
subtransaction object with the same name as the outer transaction
object, and then dispose of it and "reveal" the original. There will
always be an object called "trans", and it will always be the
appropriate transaction to do queries on, but it'll change what it is.

ChrisA