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For variables, Python has function scope, module scope, and global scope. Names enter context at the start of a scope (function, module, or global scope), and exit context when a non-nested function is called or the scope ends. If a name is used prior to variable initialization, this raises a runtime exception.
Local variables may have a lexical or dynamic scope, though lexical (static) scoping is far more common.In lexical scoping (or lexical scope; also called static scoping or static scope), if a variable name's scope is a certain block, then its scope is the program text of the block definition: within that block's text, the variable name exists, and is bound to the variable's value, but outside ...
The term closure is often used as a synonym for anonymous function, though strictly, an anonymous function is a function literal without a name, while a closure is an instance of a function, a value, whose non-local variables have been bound either to values or to storage locations (depending on the language; see the lexical environment section below).
A higher-order function is a function that takes a function as an argument or returns one as a result. This is commonly used to customize the behavior of a generically defined function, often a looping construct or recursion scheme. Anonymous functions are a convenient way to specify such function arguments. The following examples are in Python 3.
Immediately invoked function expressions may be written in a number of different ways. [3] A common convention is to enclose the function expression – and optionally its invocation operator – with the grouping operator, [4] in parentheses, to tell the parser explicitly to expect an expression.
Non-local variables are the primary reason it is difficult to support nested, anonymous, higher-order and thereby first-class functions in a programming language. If the nested function or functions are (mutually) recursive, it becomes hard for the compiler to know exactly where on the call stack the non-local variable was allocated, as the frame pointer only points to the local variable of ...
Numeric literals in Python are of the normal sort, e.g. 0, -1, 3.4, 3.5e-8. Python has arbitrary-length integers and automatically increases their storage size as necessary. Prior to Python 3, there were two kinds of integral numbers: traditional fixed size integers and "long" integers of arbitrary size.
A set of statements is in turn generally structured as a block, which in addition to grouping, also defines a lexical scope. Interrupts and signals are low-level mechanisms that can alter the flow of control in a way similar to a subroutine , but usually occur as a response to some external stimulus or event (that can occur asynchronously ...