Newbie: question regarding references and class relationships

[Tim Chase]

On 2013-06-11 08:54, Chris Angelico wrote:
> >> Another principle similar to 'Don't add extraneous code' is
> >> 'Don't rebind builtins'.
> >
> > OK, we've all done it by accident (especially when starting out),
> > but are there people that rebind builtins intentionally?
> 
> There are times when you don't care what you shadow, like using id
> for a database ID.

While that's certainly the most common, there are a lot of items in
__builtins__ that are there for convenience that I wouldn't think
twice about rebinding, especially in a local scope (I might take more
care at a module scope, but still wouldn't care much).  E.g.

  apply
  bin
  buffer
  coerce
  filter
  format
  input

Some are deprecated, some are easily replaced by (what I consider
more readible) list comprehensions, and some have alternate meanings
that might be the right word-choice inside a function and wouldn't be
missed (I'd expect to see a bin-sort function use variables called
"bin" and not needing to convert from integer-to-string)

And some strings that are harmless outside the interactive interpreter

  copyright
  credits
  exit
  license
  quit

-tkc