[Python-Dev] Explicit Lexical Scoping (pre-PEP?) (original) (raw)

Jeremy Hylton jeremy at alum.mit.edu
Mon Jul 10 22:43:58 CEST 2006

On 7/10/06, Ka-Ping Yee <python-dev at zesty.ca> wrote:

On Mon, 10 Jul 2006 skip at pobox.com wrote: > I think Talin's got a point though. It seems hard to find one short English > word that captures the essence of the desired behavior. None of the words > in his list seem strongly suggestive of the meaning to me. I suspect that > means one's ultimately as good (or as bad) as the rest.

What's wrong with "nonlocal"? I don't think i've seen an argument against that one so far (from Talin or others).

It's a made-up word. You won't find it in the dictionary and the google define: query sends me to a wikipedia page about quantum mechanics. It also expresses itself in the negative form "not local" as opposed to the positive form like global "this is a global." Finally, I think it sounds yucky.

To express this email in the positive form:

  1. Reserved words should be real words.
  2. The meaning of the word should be clear.
  3. "Put statements in positive form." (Strunk & White)
  4. The word should sound good.

global meets all of these requirements. "free" was the word I remember preferring from earlier discussions, but I think it fails #2. (Too much confusion about freeing memory, for example.)

Jeremy

-- ?!ng

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