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Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2015 02:04:21 +1000
Subject: Re: Python handles globals badly.
From: Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
Cc: "python-list@python.org" <python-list@python.org>
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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:96354

On Sat, Sep 12, 2015 at 1:57 AM,  <random832@fastmail.us> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 11, 2015, at 11:55, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> On Sat, Sep 12, 2015 at 1:49 AM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Ah, that makes sense. It's writing into the dict that is created and
>> > returned by locals(), but not actually updating the frame locals which
>> > are the source of truth.
>>
>> Yeah... but it only makes sense to people who understand the
>> implementation. It's certainly not a logical and sane behaviour that
>> would be worth documenting and using.
>
> What else would you document? Reading from them is a reasonable thing to
> do, and works. Writing to them is a reasonable thing to want to do, but
> won't work, so you need to document that it doesn't work.

Documenting that "it doesn't work" seems fine. Documenting the
specific behaviour (that it gives you a sort of "shadow" locals, into
which you can write, but which won't persist past the execution of
that block of code) seems pointless. Especially since this behaviour
is implementation-dependent anyway.

ChrisA