> Thanks Luke. Saved me quite a headache. I will use in_file instead.
> Makes more sense anyway.
Hi Nathan,
Just wanted to chime in here: you may have fewer issues with name
conflicts if you use more functions.
For example:
######
>>> def test():
... input = 42
... print input
...
>>> test()
42
>>> input
<built-in function input>
######
What this tries to so is that functions offer a little bit of isolation:
within a function, you can usually just use names with abandon, because it
won't affect the outside world. We'd say here that test() uses 'input' as
a "local" variable.
Of course, if we try to do something like:
######
>>> def test():
... input = 42
... s = input("hi, what's your age? ")
...
>>> test()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
File "<stdin>", line 3, in test
TypeError: 'int' object is not callable
######
we should expect to see trouble within the function, since we've
overwritten 'input'.
However, outside the function, we're still good:
######
>>> input("hello: ")
hello: 42
42
######
So that's one benefit of doing work in functions: we can box things in so
that, if we make a mistake, our mistake is isolated to the function, and
not to the outside world.
Hope this helps!
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