[Python-Dev] Lexical scoping in Python 3k (original) (raw)

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Mon Jul 3 07:15:39 CEST 2006

Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

Josiah Carlson wrote: > If the only code that benefits from such changes are "very simple", > then I think that says something about its necessity.

The point is that they're only "very simple" if you can write them using access to an outer scope. Without that ability, they become less simple, less efficient, more convoluted, harder to follow, etc.

As is known and has been stated, assigning to a parent scope can be emulated in various ways, either through an explicit namespace object, or through a namespace list.

Also I don't buy the argument that something has to be useful for big, complicated things in order to be worth having in the language.

I never claimed that something needed to be useful for "big, complicated things" in order to be worth having in the language. To be explicit, if nontrivial code isn't improved, that doesn't necessarily mean that the feature is useless. However, if the feature is really only useful for generally trivial cases without the feature, then making them even more trivial, I think, is a bit of over optimization.

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