A logical consequence of def
being an executable statement
I've mentioned before that in Python, def
is actually an executable
statement (in FunctionDefinitionOrder). A logical consequences of this
is that default values for function arguments are evaluated only once,
when the def
runs.
I say this because expressions generally get evaluated when any
Python statement runs, so the expressions in things like 'def
foobar(a, b=greeble(c), d=None):
' are not being an exception. The
exception would be if they were not evaluated then and were instead
preserved as little lambda expressions to be evaluated later.
On an interesting side note, setting default values for arguments is
one of the two places in Python where the same variable name can be in
two different scopes simultaneously; the other is invoking a function
with keyword arguments. Everywhere else you write 'a=a
' the two
a
's are the same, but in these two cases the a
being assigned to
is in the new function's scope and the expression's a
is in your
current scope.
The result can be a little bit confusing, as you can see in StructsWithDefaults. (Which is one reason I like to avoid it.)
Sidebar: mutable default arguments
This means that mutable default arguments are usually not what you want, because if you change them they will stay mutated in subsequent invocations of the function. The usual pattern around this is something like:
def foobar(a, deflst=None): if deflst is None: deflst = [] ....
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