reading the manual! <self bangs head on wall>
Mike
Troy Melhase wrote:
On 4/14/07, Mike wrote:
While trying to write a recursive function involving lists, I came
across some (to me) odd behavior which I don't quite understand. Here's
a trivial function showing the problem.
from http://docs.python.org/ref/function.html :While trying to write a recursive function involving lists, I came
across some (to me) odd behavior which I don't quite understand. Here's
a trivial function showing the problem.
Default parameter values are evaluated when the function definition is
executed. This means that the expression is evaluated once, when the
function is defined, and that that same ``pre-computed'' value is used
for each call. This is especially important to understand when a
default parameter is a mutable object, such as a list or a dictionary:
if the function modifies the object (e.g. by appending an item to a
list), the default value is in effect modified.
