[Python-Dev] LOAD_NAME & classes (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz
Tue, 23 Apr 2002 17:26:10 +1200 (NZST)

Tim Peters <tim.one@comcast.net>:

I think McCarthy may be a good source :

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html

From there:

The difficulty was that when an inner recursion occurred, the value of car[x] wanted was the outer value, but the inner value was actually used. In modern terminology, lexical scoping was wanted, and dynamic scoping was obtained. ... I must confess that I regarded this difficulty as just a bug and expressed confidence that Steve Russell would soon fix it.

So it seems I was more or less right -- the semantics they wanted was lexical scoping, effectively, even if they didn't explicitly think about it.

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a | Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc. | greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+