Slashdot has recently started running what it calls 'Backslash'stories, which have (as it puts it):

[...] some of the most interesting comments and exchanges on a handfulof yesterday's Slashdot posts [...]

To me, the most interesting thing about these stories is that they area tacit admission that Slashdot's comment management model is brokenand that a lot of people don't read the comments on Slashdot stories.If most people did regularly read Slashdot comments,

Python's implementation of closures for inner functions has a well knownproblem: you can't mutate the binding of capturedouter variables. In other words, the following code does not work:

def cfunc(a):  def _if(b):    a = a + b    return a  return _if

There is nothing in the semantics of Python that require this result.Unlike the case of writing to a global variable in a function, what the a variable refers to in the scope of _if is