On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 09:33:58PM +0000, אלעזר wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 12:18 AM Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > # Recursion in functions
> > def spam():
> > return spam()
> >
>
> I just note that it *is* surprising, for most users, that you can't be sure
> that this is a recursion, yet.
Who are these "most users" of which you speak? Fortran programmers? C
programmers? *Beginner* Python programmers? You should specify who you
are referring about, rather than claim "most" without evidence.
Experienced Python programmers should realise that recursion in Python
is implemented by name lookup, like all other function calls, so if you
rebind the name "spam" to something else, the function will call
something else. This is no different from any other form of function
call, including calls to built-ins. If you rebind or shadow a name, you
will change which object is called. That shouldn't be a surprise,
whether it involves recursion or not.
> So it if you want a trusted-upon recursion
> you should write
>
> # spam:
> def spam():
> def spam():
> return spam()
> return spam()
*shrug* But if I do that, then I make it difficult or impossible to
monkey-patch spam on the fly, for instance in the interactive
interpreter.
I wouldn't do it in production, but for interactive exploritory work, it
is astonishing how often monkey-patching comes in handy. Just yesterday
I played around with some code where I monkey-patched the built-in
iter() so I could get a better idea of how the code worked.
The straight-forward and simple way of writing a recursive spam()
function surprises beginners, but they might go years or their entire
career without running into a situation where they are caught by
surprise. After all, it is rare for productuon code to rename functions,
and rarer still to do it to recursive functions:
func = spam
spam = something_else()
func() # why does the recursion not work???
In production code, that sort of thing almost never happens.
On the other hand, your clever trick for preventing that surprise will
surprise *me* and other experienced Pythonistas who know how recursion
and function calls work in Python and expect to be able to
take advantage of that when and if needed.
In other words, in order to protect beginners from accidents which are
extremely rare, you will take away power from experienced programmers
who are more likely to want to make use of that power. I don't think
that's a good tradeoff.
For the avoidance of doubt: we're all adults here. If you personally
want to write your recursive functions the "trusted" way, go right
ahead. It will make them just a little bit less useful to experts, add
an insignificant amount of safety, and require a bit more work on your
part. But it's your code, and I don't intend to tell you not to do this.
In the meantime, I'll usually just write my recursive functions the
old-fashioned normal way.
--
Steve
_______________________________________________
Python-ideas mailing list
Python-ideas@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas
Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
