On Sun, May 14, 2017 at 2:53 PM, Brendan Barnwell <brenb...@brenbarn.net> wrote:
> Attributes aren't just for passing things to other methods. They're
> for storing state. In your proposed system, how would an object mutate one
> of its own attributes? It looks like "x" here is just stored in a function
> closure, which wouldn't allow easy mutation. Also, how would another object
> access the attribute from outside (as we currently do with self.x)? You can
> say we'd only use this new attribute-free approach when we want to pass a
> constructor argument that's used but never mutated or accessed from outside,
> but that severely restricts the potential use cases, and all it saves you is
> typing "self".
My expectation is that you'd be using "nonlocal x" to do that.
Closures can be used to emulate classes (and vice versa). However, in
Python, the syntax for reaching outside a method to access the closure
is significantly clunkier than the equivalent in C-derived languages:
// JavaScript
function outer() {
var x = 0;
function inner() {
x += 2;
}
}
# Python
def outer():
x = 0
def inner():
nonlocal x
x += 2
Is it better to say "nonlocal" on everything you use than to say
"self.x" on each use? I say no, because it makes copying and pasting
code dangerous - reading attributes will work, but mutating them
requires the nonlocal tag. With "self.x", it's the same on both, and
it's the same in all methods.
ChrisA
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