Michele Simionato wrote:
However this approach has a drawback (which is not there in Scheme, since Scheme has set!): if a new scope was created at each iteration (which is what the function call is doing) we could not reassign variables (i.e. they would become names locals to the "for" scope, touching them would not affect variables outside the scope).
There is a middle way: the for-loop could be made to create a new binding for its control variable on each iteration, while the body continues to execute in the outer scope as before.
It would actually be very easy to implement this in CPython the way it currently works. Guido seems to be against this sort of thing, though, as he seems to regard it as a useful feature that the for-loop control variable is not local to the loop.
-- Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
