Lawrence D'Oliveiro <l...@geek-central.gen.new_zealand> writes: > Mediocre programmers with a hankering towards cleverness latch onto it > as an ingenious way of maintaing persistent context in-between calls > to a function, completely overlooking the fact that Python offers much > more straightforward, comprehensible, flexible, and above all > maintainable ways of doing that sort of thing.
It does nowadays. Once upon a time, Python didn't have proper closures, and argument defaults, evaluated at function-definition time, were the only way of capturing data from the surrounding environment. You may be confusing `mediocre' with `old-fashioned', and `a hankering towards cleverness' with `wanting to run code on old Python interpreters'. This last may be because the relevant code was written back when those `old' interpreters were shiny and new. -- [mdw] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list